Palliative care physician Richard Leiter, MD, MA, recounts his support of a young patient with end-of-life care and the complexities of communicating with his family.
My story is called I hope so too. And it tells the story of a young man. I took care of way back when I was in fellowship and my palliative care training. And uh it's a story about hope and how we can as clinicians, how we can hold hope with our patients with their families while also acknowledging that things aren't going as well as we would like them to. So the story, it's a, it's a young man who had had a bone marrow transplant but was unfortunately dying of graft versus host disease. And talks about, I think the communication mistake I made in, in talking to his uh mother in not being able to hold hope with her. And how that really informs my care going forward. Hope it, it can be very abstract and it, it can be almost ethereal and yet it can also be very, very practical and it depends on each patient and what they're hoping for and what their families are hoping for and, and their world view. Um But I think hope is critical to their care and really a being able to align with their hopes even if we worry they may not be realistic. I think we can still do that work of aligning with them and then also work to acknowledge how hard things may be.
