Work has been rough this week. Thoughts of it invade my precious spare time. When I get home late, I fall asleep obsessing about whether I told the person caring for my patients overnight that ONE little tidbit. The panel of patients my intern and I are carrying are, without a doubt, the sickest patients in one of the biggest, busiest intensive care units in the Northeast. We have one heartbreakingly young patient who is awaiting an organ transplant. He arrived in our ICU 6 days ago. 8 days ago he “wasn’t feeling well.” If a match isn’t found in the next 2-3 days, he will die. He is on maximal medical support and replacement therapy for his failing organ, but this is only temporizing and he is declining steadily. Both last night and the night before, there was talk of an organ available. The first was of unsuitable quality. Last night, there was more than talk. There was an OR booked for transplantation. The organ was located nearby, so in order to optimize the schedule, we had to mobilize for the OR before the organ was fully procured. He was all packed up to travel to the OR - a process that requires 2 nurses and 45 minutes - when the call came that the organ would not be available. The surgeons (in typical surgeon fashion) completely neglected to think of one key task - telling the family. The task fell to me, and it broke my heart to tell his mom. I watched her face fall, her broken heart cracking just a bit more with this second blow in as many days. A glimmer of hope, snatched away once again.
It’s hard to get worked up about any of the things that go wrong in my life when I have a window into the lives of these families.
