Hippocrates In San Diego

Loss of Sensation

Some people still are impacted when they encounter death or other morbid events in their lives. In medical school they beat that feeling out of you. They start you early, doing anatomical dissections of donated cadavers at the beginning of the second year. I think everyone who has been through it remembers the feeling of that first day, when we were introduced to the people that would become our anatomy “partners” for the next several weeks. I remember walking down the hall outside the anatomy lab, seeing one of my classmates running for the bathroom with her hand over her mouth. My own heart rate was rapid that day - a strange combination of anxiety, anticipation, and fear. I remember seeing the phrase painted on one wall of the lab — some saying by some old Greek physician that escapes me now. I remember the stink of formaldehyde, how my scrubs reeked for weeks, how my skin was scrubbed raw trying to remove the smell. I remember those damned exams - one nerve buried deep in a limb or cavity somewhere was tagged with a piece of string — give the name, the insertion point of the muscle it innervates, and the name of the nucleus that modifies its function. Huh?

Fast forward 6 years. I’m working as a physician now, and frequently have to give “the bad news,” or talk to family about stopping therapies that are only prolonging the agony. Sometimes I have to help the patient and the family in the last few days of life; not everyone dies at home in their sleep, unfortunately. Sometimes it’s a much more prolonged process: I can anticipate weeks or months will go by with continuing failure, more pain, more suffering. Sometimes it’s hard to convince the family that I can see that far in the future. But if they step back, they usually can see it for themselves. We’re all headed that way, after all. We know what’s coming.