Tuesday, March 3, 2015

SHORT STORY

       I did write about the life and death and about the 'time' of death.(and the birth). But it kind of struck me as I was reading an old book written by Dr, Weiss, who has few books to his name and does lot of lectures now a days. He wrote this book several years ago called MANY LIVES,MANY MASTERS. He had 'regressed' one patient not only in this life , but in several previous lives.Then she starts talking about the previous life and then when she dies , she is in astral level and the Masters teach or give explanation.In this book it was stated that people in the astral level could decide to get 'rebirth' and the time of the death. I was not sure if one can determine the time of the Death . I often see patients that have such a horrendous disease that even though they 'want to live', they do not. Some of them are young and some have many reasons to live . This struck me as I saw this patient recently.
      I was called to see this 71 years old patient , who was admitted to the hospital for the diagnosis of pneumonia. He had quit smoking more than 15 years ago . He had some shortness of the breath and had cough and some fever though the fever was low grade. He had no elevation of the white cell count , as is the case in the infection like pneumonia. His chest X-ray showed the pneumonia and he also had a fluid around the lung. I spoke the wife , who happened to have worked in medical field and knew some medical terminology.I did the CT scan and it showed the pneumonia and the fluid .I was concerned and was worried that there may be something more than just the pneumonia.I did mention this to them and she was not very happy.May be she did not not want to hear the bad news. I decided to do the bronchoscopy to rule out cancer as the cause of the CT finding . It was OK . So I did do the procedure to take fluid. The fluid was positive for the cancer , cancer of the lung. So we called the oncologist and did additional work up . We did a bone scan as he was having lot of pain and I was worried about spread of the cancer to the bones.It was OK .So I was happy . Then we did PET scan . In pet scan one can pickup cancer anywhere in the body. The accuracy of the PET scan is as high as 88%, not 100% , but 88% is very good pick up . It was a shock to see the report. The PET scan showed the spread of the cancer to bones, ribs , spine and lungs all over. After knowing the PET scan finding the family and patient decided to do no further treatment except to consider radiation to the painful areas in spine . Due to the collection of the fluid we had to put a catheter. So one can drain the fluid periodically without having to stick a needle .
       He was discharged . He came back in less than 2 weeks and had more shortness of the breath  and some pain . The radiation therapy was almost completed and question was to consider a pill for the cancer . I tried to drain the fluid but there was none and it looked like use of steroids and antibiotics and morphine seemed to have worked . And then I got a call at about 8 pm . He was having severe pain and morphine has to be increased.I did new CT scan .IT SHOWED TUMOUR ENCASING THE ENTIRE RIGHT LUNG!I went to see him in the morning and told the family the findings . We increased the narcotics to make him comfortable. He died that evening. It was less than 6 weeks between the diagnosis of the cancer and his demise . This was the short story and I am not sure he wanted to die or may be he did want to !

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