The family medicine fellow set down her pen and inhaled deeply. “So when is it OK to cry with a patient?” she asked the senior attending across the table, a veteran internist in her mid-60s.
About a dozen of us — fellows, physicians, writers — sat hunched over a paper- and laptop-strewn table in the fellows’ shared office, talking about a poem: Sharon Olds’ “Death of Marilyn Monroe.” In it, Olds describes the experience of three EMTs as they remove the iconic actress’s cold body from her place of death. She writes:
These men were never the same. They went out
afterwards, as they always did,
for a drink or two, but they could not meet
each other’s eyes.
Our discussion had meandered from the response of the three EMTs to what it feels like for these physicians-in-training to sit at the bedsides of their own dying patients. Then came the fellow’s question. Everyone looked, eager for an answer.
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