1 minute read
Title: Little Vial, Big Impact
Title: Last Words
My brother is a PGY5 Otolaryngology Resident on the East Coast. He often calls me, his academic hospitalist sister, to discuss complex medical cases or if trainees are struggling and he needs advice. He told me about a PGY2 resident he had worked with who had a very difficult week and had mentioned to my brother that on two occasions she had heard the patient’s last words and that she felt unequal to carrying that burden. He was struck by the gravity of what they are asked to do when managing complex airways and in response I wrote and shared this with him so he in turn could share it with her. We often do not realize what we as physicians are called to do or asked to be the keeper of.
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RUTH FRANKS SNEDECOR, MD, is an inpatient teaching attending at Banner-University Medical Center Phoenix (B-UMCP). She obtained her MD from the University of Arizona, College of Medicine, Tucson. She is board certified in Internal Medicine and is most proud of the residents and students she teaches to grow their skills as kind, thoughtful, and brilliant physicians caring for hospitalized patients.
No one ever asked me to hold your last words. I knew I could possibly be the attendant to your last breath. I knew I may be the caretaker to your last heart beat. It comes with the job.
I said about those things. But last words…
That is for priests on death beds for confessions of old sins. For loved ones on whispered breaths for resolutions of young mistakes.
No one told me I had to hold your last words. They are not mine to hear. They are not mine to know. They are too much to carry in my heart. Your last words don’t belong to my ears, to my head to recall.
No one prepared me to hold your last words. It was my own deafening realization when you died that I had heard your last words, so scared and so huge. I didn’t tell those you loved your last words because it would shatter them too. So I kept them just to me. No one cautioned me I was to be the keeper of your last words and how lonely that would be.
