Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: End of Life

  • Ushers of life

    Genevieve KupskyWashington, D.C., USA “You are on holy ground. Time is sacred, and the veil is thin.” The chaplain left the newly-oriented volunteers with these words as we completed our training. My mind was spinning with the implications of this experience. Each patient we interacted with would have a prognosis of six months to live…

  • The talk

    Akshay KhatriValhalla, New York, United States I walked into the emergency department with a sense of trepidation. The patient I was evaluating was Mrs. G, a woman whom I had cared for in the hospital a few months earlier. Now she was back from the nursing home with more shortness of breath. Having received a…

  • When there’s no plug to pull

    Darcy SternbergNew York, New York, United States At night I lie awake on the living room sofa staring at the moon, envying its constancy. Change had eaten up our lives. My husband, Marty, and I met in 1986 when he was forty-nine and I was thirty-five. Should I have been concerned by a shaky left…

  • An act of cowardice

    Michael ShenIndianapolis, Indiana, United States In autumn, the leaves turn yellow and die. The cirrhotics in the unit do the same. Their path already charted, their lives like leaves in the wind, we carried them as long as we could. We poked and drained and filled, knowing that nothing would change the inevitable. Like leaves,…

  • La Pieta

    Rachel FleishmanPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania, United States A mother holds her dead child. His body flops open without resistance, freshly dead. His head is cocked back, shoulder lifted, arms release the last vestige of grip. Her face sullen, her hand beside him open and offering, she holds but does not touch her son. A single moment of…

  • A good man

    Tuhina RamanPhiladelphia, PA, USA My heart sank as soon as I saw it—tumor nodules in the trachea and a mass eroding through the stent in his airway. I had been hoping against hope. It is always difficult losing a favorite patient to a bad disease. I had biopsied and stented his airway five weeks earlier.…

  • Gingerbread

    Olga DiganchinaAstana, Kazakhstan The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.-Mark Twain Patients had mostly become faceless for me. I had treated and discharged so many of them as a resident that I seemed to have a job on an assembly line.…

  • They would rather go alone

    Kera MorrisDenver, Colorado, USA Dad had been in and out of hospice for years. It had not occurred to me that you could go into hospice and come out on your own two feet, but it was apparently the case. When I got the last call about Dad having an episode and needing to go…

  • Taking a history in the ICU: Social: Does your husband still smoke?

    Sophia Valesca GörgensAtlanta, Georgia, United States He smokes when he thinks I’m not looking,she tells me, then glances at him as ifexpecting him to contradict her but the ventilator is pressed to his faceand his eyes are lidded dim with midazolamfor sedation, fentanyl for pain. There is pain in her words, her body, and she…

  • Where am I when my digital footprint persists indefinitely?

    Naomi Rachel OldhamWest London, United Kingdom Our digital selves remain present in the world even after we have died. Social media and email accounts, websites to which we have subscribed, photos, videos, and voice messages persist after death. What might this mean when considering an individual’s presence or absence in the world? Throughout different periods…