I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel as I drove home and replayed the conversation in my head. You can try to couch it in euphemisms or change the wording to soften the blow, but regardless, the message is the same. Despite advances in modern medicine, there always comes a time where our best efforts to stave off the inevitable become futile. I wondered how many times I'd had the same conversation thus far - certainly more than dozens, maybe even a hundred. The same tropes played themselves out on the family's receiving end - the elderly patient's daughter in denial; the wife sorrowfully accepting; the son, guilty as he had avoided the burden of his father's disease for so long, forced to confront the gravity thereof. Like a prism, the same message refracting many different ways.
I remembered the first time I ever participated in such a conversation.
