The Pitfalls of Promises

By Mikkael Sekeres, MD, MS

Three-quarters of the way through inpatient rounds, my team and I stopped to see our patient, a woman in her 50s who had been given a diagnosis of acute lymphocytic leukemia and had been started on chemotherapy over three weeks earlier. She had been doing well and her blood counts were starting to recover, so she would soon go home.

Her eyes were anxious, though, and she wrung her hands.

I met her eyes, and smiled a bit. “You’ve done great throughout your chemotherapy course, you’re on minimal medications, and your bone marrow is recovering. We aren’t at all nervous about you,” I said. “Why are you worried?”

She exhaled, though I couldn’t tell if she did so because she was relieved to hear about her good health, or frustrated that she had to repeat herself. “I’ve seen family members die in the hospital and I don’t want that to happen to me,” she said. “Promise me I won’t die here.”

Read the full New York Times column by Dr. Sekeres, Director of Cleveland Clinic Cancer Center’s Leukemia Program.