No Regrets
In the experiences I have had, the patient is usually too preoccupied with his own pain or suffering to actually say a regret. However, there have been plenty of experiences where I’ve had a lot of regret and which sometimes still wake me up from sleep even though they are 10-year-old stories. The regrets are not related to a mistake I made, but rather about “maybe I could have done more.”
10 years back, I lost an 18-year-old female patient who had come into the hospital in a critical state. I was working in a very busy, overburdened hospital in a developing country. She was an only daughter and I still remember her parents. The father had told me something along the lines of, “She’s our only daughter, please do whatever is possible to save her.”
She had a sudden collapse and went. I’ve asked numerous colleagues and seniors since then about what more I could have done to save her, and they’ve all said that nothing more could have been done. But I still feel that I should have left everything and just sat with the patient the whole night, watching for any catastrophe to hit. It is my one huge regret of my life.
I blame myself even though I can’t fathom what more I could have done. It took me four years to tell this story to my wife. And this is probably only the third or fourth occasion in the last 10 years that I’m mentioning this. But it stays with me.
Story credit: Reddit / GrumpNinny