Remembering the Person within the Patient
Lauren Cantor, a third-year medical student, developed “a wonderful relationship” over two years with her FCE family. On the day she spoke with Medicine at Michigan, she had been on a rotation with a team of physicians and residents treating cancer patients. A problem arose with a patient whose lymphoma had just become symptomatic a year after diagnosis.
“He didn’t want to have a test done. All the different teams came around, and everyone kept saying to him, ‘You have to have this test done.’ Nobody said to him: ‘Well, why don’t you want this done?’ So my team sent me in and said, ‘As the M-3, you’re the one who’s supposed to really get to know the patient. Find out and convince him to do it.’
“So we sat down and he said, ‘Look, I’m scared. I don’t want to know the results of this test. Every test they’ve done, they find something else.’ We sat and we talked for half an hour. It really just brought me back [to her FCE experience.] I even said to him, ‘You know, we want to do what’s best for you, but we forget that it’s you. All we think about is the cancer, and all we want to do is treat the cancer the best way we know how. We forget that it’s your body and you’re the one who has to go through this test.’
“And it’s not an easy procedure. Nobody wants to have it done. We don’t step back enough and say, ‘This is a person.’
“He said he would think about it. He was happy that someone finally sat down and acknowledged him. We held hands the whole time we were talking, and he cried. You know, I think it was the first time that he finally got to talk to someone about this. We don’t stop and talk and explain things.
“We do all these FCE experiences, and we have these standardized patient interactions in our first and second year, and we talk about all this touchy-feely stuff. And as silly as you might think it is when you’re going through those things, it actually paid off today.
—James Tobin
Also:
Physician-Patient Alliance: The Importance of Support
Remembering the Person within the Patient
