As a nurse, what is the most tragic discovery you have made while treating a patient?
“Prevention is better than cure, ma’am !”
Sometimes irony turns into torture. Sometimes life isn’t fair.
This patient was sixty, super healthy, and “he wanted to keep it that way.” So in stark contrast to most other male patients, he came in to have a prostate check with no indications whatsoever, just to be on the safe side. (“He stilled pissed like a race horse, even when it was not urgent.”)
His Prostate-Specific Antigen (PSA) level was staggering — in the 1000s. The diagnosis was bleak.
How do you tell a patient who feels perfectly healthy, and who has meticulously taken care of his body and mind for all of his life, that he is carrying a ticking time bomb on the inside, which has never surfaced on the outside ?
How do you tell a man full of life, that he is full of death ?
When my girlfriend told him that the cancer had spread, and that he only had a couple of good years left, he started crying — silently, but with a broken heart.
He never was in more mental pain than now.
And the worse was still to come.
SOURCES: Google images (left-hand side painting by Anton Semenov).
