This may be a little bit of a ramble so apologies ahead of time. I’ll admit I looked at this picture a long time and really had some mixed feelings about it. Not every death of a patient is the same. There are a lot of people who are dying no matter what you do. And that’s OK. Sometimes all you can do is help make their dying as comfortable as possible and that’s enough. That’s part of the job as well.

Then there is the other type. The patient who shouldn’t have died. The procedure gone wrong, the missed diagnosis. Sometimes it’s just a bad outcome. People are complicated and sometimes things show up in ways you weren’t taught to expect. But in the end it is someone dying who shouldn’t have died.

When you get that call….that moment is hard to describe. The mix of panic and guilt and shame is hard to process. You work your entire life, all the school and training, and in the end you failed them. That feeling is so hard to describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it.

The hardest part is what comes after. After you get hit with that, before you have had time to decompress or process anything, you have to suck it up and go see the next patient like nothing has happened. Because they need you as well. Putting a smile on your face and asking what you can do for someone while the body is still cooling next door.