Recently, I've been a witness to honesty in the medical realm. A friend spent many weeks in ICU, and I was wowed by some of the doctors' ability to say "We don't know, we may never know" about her illness. Younger doctors may be trained differently, and seem more comfortable being human instead of omniscient. The doctors and bankers as gods thing is no longer the culture for most people. Paradoxically, for me and others, the admission of not knowing all the answers makes us trust them more. This is truth telling when anything else increases the terror. Now, several of the friends wanted, demanded, answers or transferring the patient or consulting other doctors. It's always worth listening to those people, because examining all the options is responsible. But often these people are uncomfortable with uncertainty. We all wish for certainty, but promising it is delusional. Nothing is certain, except, as they say, death and taxes. What this medical team did is honestly tell us they were doing everything in their power to keep her alive while she fought off the virus. That statement told us she was in danger, that medicine could only do so much, but the team was passionate about fighting for her. And she's home now. If the outcome had been otherwise, there would have been a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking, guilt and agony, but us grownups know there is serendipity and luck and mystery in medicine, as in everything else.
Yesterday I went to my own doctor for knee pain. I waited 10 days and ignored a friend's advice to go immediately because it might be a blood clot and another who thought it was a pinched nerve. I gave it a chance to get better. It seemed to, then felt worse. My doctor was matter of fact. I am getting older and there is wear and tear on the knee. This makes sense. She also told me I could take Tylenol and use BenGay or some other product, but they would not fix anything, just ease the symptoms. The best thing was to lose some weight. Ah. Painful to hear but true. The one real thing I can do to protect my knee is take the load off. I appreciated her candor. I didn't want medicines or cover ups, I wanted to hear the one helpful statement that I could really affect. So now, I know I need to lose weight for diabetes and for my knees. She treated me as an actor in my own life. That's respect.
I don't think my mother's doctors made an effort to tell her honestly what she needed to do. She was a smoker and an alcoholic. Her doctor might have called up the nerve to give her the names of clinics that could help. He needed to call my dad and urge him to get her in a program. But nobody liked to rock the boat in the old days. Maybe he thought it futile, but it wasn't his call to make. It was hers. So she died instantly of her first heart attack at 61. She was on no medication. We begged her to quit smoking, her grandkids begged her, but she didn't think it was our business. I told her how worried I was about her drinking, but I was just her daughter. She pretty much didn't listen to anything my Dad said. So she died, and maybe she would have anyway, it was too late. But her doctor should have cared enough to try at least once. Right speech is not harming.
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