Anonymous Doctor

Some people are terrible.

A patient died today after a week in the hospital. For the past four days, we'd been calling his wife, telling her she needs to come in, her husband isn't doing well, not much time left, she should really be with him....

And every day, she's made some excuse. "I'm very busy, I can't come in today. Maybe tomorrow...." And maybe she's just been afraid of death, doesn't like hospitals, couldn't bear to see her husband this way-- but sometimes you have to just suck it up. It sounds harsh, but if she really loved him, how could she let him die alone like that, with no one?

So I had to be the one to call her today, after he died, and tell her. And she starts yelling at me-- "How could this happen? Why didn't anyone tell me this was going to happen?" Uh, we did. For the past four days we did.

Still it took her five hours to get to the hospital-- she lives twenty minutes away-- and of course we'd already moved the body to the morgue. She comes in screaming-- where is the body, I have to see the body.

She's saying we killed him, it's all our fault, that he came in fine and we killed him. He came in dying. We made him comfortable. We didn't do anything, we told her he was dying, she didn't even say goodbye. She left him for a week, visiting him once. She left him to die alone.

HE thanked us. The night before he died, in a lucid moment, he thanked us for taking care of him. She didn't deserve him. She doesn't deserve anyone.