close to home

I suppose that after a year of working here, and having hundreds of
patients die under my care, I should be more used to the idea. I don't
go to the death scenes of my patients very often, simply because it's
too hard to do it over and over again. It's difficult to be in the room
with six wailing women, rolling around on the concrete floor, unable to
stand, staring up at you with questions in their eyes. I unfairly
interpret this as a kind of accusation, and I feel that every time
someone dies it undermines the work that we're trying to do here at the
hospital to provide hope and comfort to sick people. In fact, I was
told when I arrived that about a year prior to my arrival, when someone
died in the OR, the next day half the hospital got up and left, whether
they were finished with their treatment or not.
Yesterday I was forced to operate on a very sick 70 year-old man who
came in with signs of intestinal obstruction -- vomiting feces,
distended abdomen, no bowel movement for 3 days -- but when I made the
decision to go to the OR, we couldn't find a reversible cause and so we
closed him back up after rooting around for 30 minutes. This would be a
case where slightly more advanced imaging like a CAT scan would be
invaluable in preventing an unnecessary operation. He continued to get
worse and worse throughout the day and about 10 hours after going to the
OR he died. Like many of the cases I've seen here at Chitokoloki, he
was the family member of one of the staff here and it's very difficult
to go to church and see them the next day when you know that they died
under your care, whether you did something right or wrong in that care.
In a case like this where you're inexperienced and the usual doctor
isn't there, there's the questions of whether you know what you're doing
as well and whether the family member would have survived if the 'real'
doctor had been around.
I'll go to the funeral today and stand with the family of the people who
may or may not be harboring these thoughts about me. It's easier to not
go, knowing that people will probably forgive the omission as a white
man and a visitor from somewhere else, but it still seems like a
cowardly thing to do to avoid the family and the situation altogether.