The Human Touch 2013 - University of Colorado Denver

Does one miss a prostate?
Jeannette Guerrasio, MD
Post Op Day #0
Continuous patient control analgesia?
For a man who, on a bad day,
chooses the caffeinated tea.
Now apneic
His painfully exhausted body drifts off to sleep
Only to be awoken over and over again
by the alarms of hypoxia.
His eyes glare directly into mine
With desperate fatigue, anger and helplessness,
Too weak to speak, yet, demanding some respite.
Infusion of narcotics now long gone
Yet the apnea and cycle of disturbed sleep persists.
As I stand to leave, the nurse moves in to infuse
Benadryl for nausea?
He looks to me for answers and relief.
Post Op Day #1
Diaphoretic and febrile,
With an ice pack melting on his bald head,
The Jackson Pratt drain fi lls by the hour
Out competing the bladder catheter
Both poinsetta red.
The antibiotics seem a suboptimal choice.
He asks me to make him better quicker.
better than the new laparoscopic techniques at the university
just 10 miles away.. .
Post Op Day #2
More fevers, more post operative drainage,
Except from the bladder catheter.
Nothing.
Nothing but expanding bladder pain,
Until the obstructing blood clots are fl ushed away.
His anxiety climbs as he compulsively watches
his now unplugged catheter drain urine away from his body.
He looks to me for some relief in the form of an anxiolytic,
but won’t ask anyone else.
As he coughs up thick gray phlegm from his
sarcoid scarred lungs.
He doesn’t want them to fi nd anything else.
He asks me to stop all of the chest x-rays.
Post Op Day #3
More fevers, too much post operative drainage
He is frustrated that everyone is so happy
All he has done is pass gas.
He insists the doctor said he could go home
Upon clarifi cation, it is not his doctor who said this,
but the ones on the internet who report a 3-5 day hospitalization
Convinced that the fevers are from being in a hospital full of germs,
He begs me to let him go home.
“Papa, I am so sorry, but I cannot be a doctor here.” •
But he insisted on this small community hospital
two blocks from home.
Open surgery,
he reasoned would allow the doctors to see better,
more reassurance that they would remove all of the cancer
PG 82
PG 83