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SearchA doctor and a patient’s daughter confront decisions on dying
By Mikkael Sekeres, MD, MS
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The phone call came when these types of calls tend to come — late on a Friday afternoon at the tail end of a brutal Cleveland winter. I picked up the handset as I glanced outside my office windows at the accelerating snowfall, wondering whether I should leave work early.
It was the daughter of a patient with a chronic form of leukemia whom I had been following for 10 years . . .
“Dad’s been admitted to the intensive care unit.” She was calling from her mobile phone as she walked through the parking garage of a small hospital south of ours. “I’m on my way to see him. He came to the hospital because he was short of breath, and now they have him on a breathing machine. It all happened so fast.”
Read the New York Times column by Dr. Sekeres.
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