Nobody is more aware of how things go wrong in healthcare than doctors. No one knows the extent to which neglect, inattention, and mistake run rampant in the corridors of our medical centers. Finally no group is as keenly aware of just how tentatively any life, in the words of sixteenth century English playwright Robert Greene, “hangs in the uncertain balance of proud time.”
I described earlier how doctors could become disoriented when someone they love is in the grips of a dangerous illness or circumstances where their life may be forfeit. As physicians, we believe—we pray--that we will be spared such agonies. Haven’t we had to bear witness to them among in so many of our patients already? Francis Bacon wrote: “Men fear death as children fear to go into the dark; and as this natural fear is increased with tales, so does the other.” [Essays, 1625, Of Death] Physicians hear the tales all day long.
I remember watching a tour of children while I was doing my pediatric neurosurgical training at Boston Children’s Hospital. The group--a dozen kids, little more than toddlers—were all holding hands, adorably. They snaked their way through the hospital halls. Turned out all of them were scheduled to have their tonsils removed during the course of the next week and they were get a “pre-op orientation.” The nurses had them all turned out in surgical caps, masks, and gloves. Led first into the anesthesia induction area, they all got to try on oxygen masks, sniffing, snorting, and wiggling the spring-green tubing like elephants with crazed trunks.
Following the logical progression of a surgical case, the children were next escorted into an empty operating room. Hushed, herded together into the room, their eyes collectively looked upward, like a twenty-four eyed creature--half child and half disposable surgical supplies. The beast now displayed a distinct twinge of antiseptic fear, transmitted like a venomous bite. Then, finally, they spilled back out into the light and relief of the recovery room, giddy, tearing their surgical masks off.
There, in one gurney, was a single teddy bear, propped up on two pillows. He had a small bandage applied to his throat and an IV taped to his furry forearm. A nurse’s hand sneaked behind the bear’s neck and started its head bobbing in time with the words. The bear started asking for sips of water politely. Then, in an eerily falsetto, husky voice, asked: “When am I going to get some ice cream?”
That must have been the signal. Another nurse just popped out of the “break room”, its heavy door no challenge to the beam of her hips. Pirouetting around, she swung a plastic tray into view, loaded with one dozen small paper cups of ice cream. Six chocolate. Six vanillas. Right on cue. Next to the cups of ice cream ran a continuous strip of small wooden spoons, no more than two or three inches long, each tucked like a sausage into its own sealed paper compartment. A cheer broke out from the children.
I wonder why we hadn’t developed similar tours for grown-ups, folks who’s might be headed to the cath lab for placement of an endovascular stent, or old men slated for their radical prostatectomies. Grown-ups could even hold hands and get cups of half-melted chocolate and vanilla ice cream too. Adults probably need as much motherly cooing and coddling as any three year old. In the end, we all want to be held close, safely holding hands with a friend.
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