The patient was dying and she knew it. In her mid-50s, she had been battling breast cancer for years, but it had spread to her bones, causing unrelenting pain that required hospitalization. Jeremy Force, a first-year oncology fellow at Duke University Medical Center who had never met the woman, was assigned to stop by her room last November to discuss her decision to enter hospice.
Employing the skills he had just learned in a day-long course, Force sat at the end of her bed and listened intently. The woman wept, telling him she was exhausted and worried about the impact her death would have on her two daughters.
“I acknowledged how hard what she was going through was,” Force said of their 15-minute conversation, “and told her I had two children, too,” and that hospice was designed to provide her additional support.
A few days later, he ran into the woman in the hall. “You’re the best physician I’ve ever worked with,” Force remembers her telling him. “I was blown away,” he says. “It was such an honor.”
[For more of this story, written by Sandra G. Boodman, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/hea...tors-empathy/387784/]
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