Not Dead

Seems like the blogging is DOA.  Hopefully I'll get back to it and have some actual content/complaining soon.

I picked the name of this blog for a reason.

Old People Die

It happens.  A lot.  If you're in the field of inpatient medicine, you will see lots and lots of old people who die.  It's just what they do.  I don't mean to sound callous or cold, but your odds of surviving even simple things go dramatically up as you age.  I've had pretty healthy 70ish year old patients come in with simple pneumonias who end up dying.  More often than not, it's grandma with 14 medical problems and 28 medicines who's suffering from some dementia who doesn't end up making it.  I don't like it, but that's what happens.

It doesn't happen to healthy 20 year olds.  Or it shouldn't.  It did this week however.  A healthy, slim 20 year old who exercised regularly and had no discernible bad habits was admitted to my service with what is normally a straightforward simple diagnosis and ended up dying.  I took this one very personally as did other physicians involved in the case, and that's not like any of us.  We're all used to death.  This one was just different.  This wasn't supposed to happen.

I've probably been doing more thinking about this than is healthy.  I don't know if that's normal or not.  I guess I'm supposed to find some deep meaning to this like, "Live every day like it's your last".  All I'm really left with is a feeling of guilt for not being able to do more, confusion as to why life is so random at times, and great sorrow for the family left behind.

They didn't teach me this in medical school.

Stereotypes

Here's something most people don't want to hear.  Stereotypes exist for a reason.  It's a human behavior that allows us to look at large amounts of information in a simple way and easily categorize things.  Or at least I think that's what one of my college professors taught me.  We all do it on varying levels.  Most of them allow us to more easily go about our lives.  Some are detrimental to the ones doing it and the ones on the receiving end.

Soooo, when you walk into the room of your 90+ year old ICU patient, what do you do?  I tend to assume that they're hard of hearing, maybe a little demented, and not generally all that interactive.  I don't mean to, but my experience tells me that this is a pretty safe assumption most of the time.  When I speak normally I usually get, "What?" as a response if I get any at all.

And sometimes those same folks are Ivy league educated PhD's who are wondering why you're yelling in their direction.  It happens.  :)