For doctors and those who intern and work with cancer patients, how do you feel about it?

[mrh125]

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I'm going to med school next year and in my year off I'm shadowing and working as a scribe for a gi doctor and today we had two cases where we found cancer in patients and I'm just amazed at how desensitized and non chalant doctors can be about it. Like Afterwards I was talking to the doc I worked with and he said "it's terrible isn't it?". I thought he was talking about cancer and how rough it is to be diagnosed with it but instead he was talking about putting up his house for sale.

I have a question for doctors and those work with patients, how do you handle diagnosing people with cancer and situations where you are in the room working with people being diagnosed with cancer and helping them?What is your demeanor like when you do it? I honestly feel like its a really difficult situation to deal with for everyone. I try and be caring and compassionate and not cold but it just can feel uncomfortable and it's not good to let it trouble you too much especially if there's only so much you can do. Do you ever get used to it and how do you feel when you have to do it?

 

[LizzyM]

Many GI cancers are very curable. My own grandmother had a GI cancer in her mid 80s and died of something unrelated 7 years later.
The doctor does have to deliver bad news but in most cases there is a standard procedure (protocol) that the patient will be directed toward whether it is surgery, chemo, radiation or a combination of those things. It isn't fun and games but it isn't the end of the world and even if it is a very grim prognosis one want to offer hope and an assurance that the patient will not be abandoned at the end of life.

Seeing patients who are newly diagnosed or making the diagnosis one's self is daily life in medicine. It isn't any more terrible than it might be for a HS guidance counselor who has to advise a student who scored a 20 on the ACT or 900 on the SAT (all the sections combined). The doctor and the counselor didn't make this happen and if they know their jobs, they know what the realistic expectations are for the future and they can help guide someone along the path to the best outcome.

 

[Dictionaria]

Well, cancer is pretty far from the worst news you can get in a doctor's office (on its own it's a pretty broad set of possibilities), and I haven't seen much of that outside of my experiences at a hospice. That said, I did CNA clinicals on a spinal rehab unit and there were some people who got some ****ty (and generally very permanent) news. We definitely saw doctors mess up communications about progress or expectations (talking to other staff in the room about the patient as if they weren't there, assuming very cheerful attitudes when patients were generally pretty depressed, etc.). We also saw doctors and nurses who did a much better job by remaining expressionless and just listening to the patients' reactions. The very best seemed to just take their cues from the individual patient, so there wasn't a set demeanor as much as a general attitude of flexibility and understanding.

 

[armybound]

I didn't do it to them...

I mean the one hope I have is usually when we break the news it's because they're in the place to have something done about it. If it's not resectable or doesn't respond to chemo/radiation, there wasn't much that could be done for them anyway.

If you get really hung up on someone's diagnosis and prognosis you'd be a nervous wreck all of your life. I do feel bad for patients, but that's the unfortunate reality of dealing in medicine. People get sick, people die. That's why we have jobs.

 

[DrBowtie]

Rule #4: The patient is the one with the disease.