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Fall 2001, Volume 38, No. 1 ONLY
@ PCMOnline SPECIAL
SECTION: DEPARTMENTS ALUMNI
VOICES -Parlor
Talk- -Family
Tree-
-Alumni Puzzler-
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The patient, a 50-year-old smoker, had already lost two-thirds of his left lung to cancer, and six months later a tumor appeared in his brain. Deciding against more surgery, he instead underwent full-brain radiation. Within three months, clusters of tumors clogged both lungs.
Young medical students now study his case intently--but not to chart the progression of his disease. What they study is a poem the patient wrote about the moment when the doctor delivered the news of his rapidly approaching death. The poem, "What the Doctor Said," by Raymond Carver, ends with the lines:
I just looked at him
for a minute and he looked back it was then
I jumped up and shook hands with this man who'd just given me
something no one else on earth had ever given me
I may even have thanked him habit being so strong
"It's a very short poem, but it's very powerful in terms of how physicians give bad news, what the patient can hear, what kind of communication is really taking place," says Pamela Schaff '76, director of the Introduction to Clinical Medicine program at the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine...
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