Table 2.

Themes from Residents' Writing: Impotence of the Physician

“And I know that at this weight, we're fighting a losing battle. We can tweak the lasix and the insulin and the neurontin, but Tony will never really get better …. But I don't tell him that because it would break him. Tony is calm now.”

“This is the best of modern medicine, I tell myself. We are monitoring heart rate, breaths taken per minute, and blood pressures in 2 locations. I am watching his urine drip out of him in real time. Every day I can recite his sodium and potassium, and I write down his white blood cell count together with exactly how many cubic centimeters of fluid went in and came out … I am producing a man too tired to speak, a man who is exhausted after just turning his head to stare into the eyes of his wife.”