A 62 year old woman has had 25 years of 3 tumblers of whiskey every night and now she is going to die. We told her that women with metastatic breast cancer had a longer survival prognosis than she did. 1-2 years left. One of her daughters steamed in the corner, angry at her mother for all those days, in spite of pleading, drinking herself to death. The other daughter, stood to my other side numbed at the news. She had revealed to me the day before that she knew this was coming. All those nights, during all those years, she would receive drunken phone calls from her mother. But now...now the expected outcome was a reality, and I had to tell the family that her liver was terribly damaged, and would not and could not get better.
3 comments:
my first thought when i glanced at the picture was that it was of a pregnant woman...and the subject line confused me. while it's relief that it has nothing to do with a baby, what a sad tale.
i can only assume your rotations are going well. it's got to be a fun shift from the classroom!
missing you!
♥
I hate liver.
I mean, I love it. . . Almost in Pablo Neruda way (look it up, honest) but the management is painful.
Once I see hepatorenal I run the other way.
This sounds like a WWBSD? situation. I'm sure he would check the JVP with a popsicle stick and then ask some open ended questions. Somehow I think that wouldn't have helped so much, if at all.
Alcoholism can be a real monster.
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