Family Meeting

With my medicine clerkship coming to an end, I realized that I had not yet taken part in a family meeting. Since I felt that this was an important process to experience, I asked if I could attend when my resident mentioned she had one scheduled one afternoon.

Having a family meeting in a hospital is usually not a good sign. It probably means that the patient is extremely ill, and isn’t well enough to make their own medical decisions, so their family members and doctors have to come together to negotiate a plan.

The meeting that afternoon was for a patient I had not been following. I quickly looked over her story - pancreatic cancer, kidney cancer, liver metastases, two giant abdominal wall hernias causing multiple intestinal obstructions. That last thing meant this 70-year-old patient has not eaten for 5 days now. So naturally, when I asked the palliative team in the meeting room if I could attend, they were very hesitant. “Only if it’s okay with the family, and if you quietly watch from the corner,” they concluded.

Lucky for me, the patient’s three children could care less if I was there or not, so I pulled a chair to the corner of the table, and commenced to be a fly on the wall.

The three children sat on one side of the table – the son was big and handicapped with a cane, one daughter had spikey short bleached hair with two full sleeves of tattoos (birds and dragons), the other daughter had a tight ponytail and pursed lips. The two palliative nurses and medical resident sat facing them on the other side of the table.

The meeting began with the facts. Your mother’s intestines are twisted around in such a way that nothing can get through; this means she cannot eat – it might burst if you put more pressure on it. If it untwists, we can feed her. If it doesn’t, we cannot.

The son held the conversation through all of this. He was calm, collected. What are the options? He asked reasonably.

We can’t do surgery – the cancer is too advanced, the surgeons signed off. There’s no treatment for her cancer. There is nothing we can do for her twisted intestines. We cannot give her food; we cannot give her water.

The daughter with the spikey bleached hair began to shake. Her dragon-covered hands covered her face, and her body heaved, up and down, in silent sobs.

So what, what does this mean? The son asked.

We can hope that she will pass gas, or go to the bathroom, which will mean her intestines have opened up. But if she doesn’t, then maybe we should think about comfort care.

Tears seeped through the dragon hands and hit the table. The sister with the pursed lips reached over. I passed a box of tissues.

How much time left if she doesn’t pass gas?

For someone who does not eat anything, I would say weeks to at most a month. I would suggest looking into hospice care.

For a while, we listened to the soft rhythm of the pursed-lip daughter rubbing the shaking back of her dragon tattooed sister.

What are you thinking? The palliative care nurse asked, finally.

“I’m thinking,” the dragon tattoo daughter finally moved her hands, exposing her red eyes and pierced nose “that you just told me Mom has only one month to live.”

Feel something, I told myself. This is as real as it can get. You cry watching movies, you weep reading books. This is happening right in front of you. Feel something.

I gave myself a little shake, but it was as if there was a thick shield of glass, separating me from the cloud of emotions stewing in the scene in front of me.

Is it possible, that I had already become hardened in the short 2 months, that others’ suffering no longer phased me? Or because nothing is registering anymore, after weeks of working and studying 18 hours a day?

I sat there, replaying the daughter’s words in my head, trying to squeeze something out of myself. But instead, I just watched as the son finally broke down, reached for the tissues, and the room was silent again.

Can we have some time? The pursed-lip daughter looked up at us as she silently comforted her two siblings.

“How do you think that went?” One of the palliative nurses asked as we stepped out the room.

“I think they took it well.” My resident replied, and turned to me “You should go look at her hernias though. They’re pretty impressive.”

So I did.

The patient looked comfortable as I sat down next to her. She smiled at me, told me she was feeling fine, and pulled up her gown to expose two melon-sized abdominal protrusions when I asked to take a look. Does it hurt? I asked when I lightly pushed on them. She shrugged. I stayed a while and exchanged some pleasantries. It felt comfortable and light, just like a conversation with any other patient.

It wasn’t until I walked out the room that I realized I had just been, for lack of better words, talking to an almost dead woman. And I knew that. But she didn’t.

That’s when the emotions washed over me, in such a rush that I couldn’t dissect them. It felt like a cloud of colors so complex, all seen for the very first time, all at once, that it made me dizzy.

So I sat down at the nursing station, and drowned in it for a while.