{"id":66899,"date":"2018-01-04T09:00:30","date_gmt":"2018-01-04T14:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=66899"},"modified":"2018-01-04T17:51:21","modified_gmt":"2018-01-04T22:51:21","slug":"npr-brush-with-death-leads-doctor-to-focus-on-patient-perspective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=66899","title":{"rendered":"(NPR) Brush With Death Leads Doctor To Focus On Patient Perspective"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The searing abdominal pain came on suddenly while Dr. Rana Awdish was having dinner with a friend. Soon she was lying in the back seat of the car racing to Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, where Awdish was completing a fellowship in critical care.<\/p>\n<p>On that night nearly a decade ago, a benign tumor in Awdish&#8217;s liver burst, causing a\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nejm.org\/doi\/full\/10.1056\/NEJMp1614078?query=TOC&amp;#.WG2Xb70jLH4.twitter\">cascade of medical catastrophes<\/a>\u00a0that almost killed her. She nearly bled to death. She was seven months pregnant at the time, and the baby did not survive. She had a stroke and, over the days and weeks to come, suffered multiple organ failures. She required several surgeries and months of rehabilitation to learn to walk and speak again.<\/p>\n<p>Helpless, lying on a gurney in the hospital&#8217;s labor and delivery area that first night, Awdish willed the medical staff to see her as a person rather than an interesting case of what she termed &#8220;Abdominal Pain and Fetal Demise.&#8221; But their medical training to remain clinically detached worked against her. Later, in the intensive care unit, she overheard her case being discussed by the surgical resident during morning rounds.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;She&#8217;s been trying to die on us,&#8221; he said. It made her angry, she says, because she was trying desperately\u00a0<em>not<\/em>\u00a0to die. &#8220;I felt he was positing me as an adversary. If my care team didn&#8217;t believe in me, what possible hope did I have?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.npr.org\/sections\/health-shots\/2018\/01\/03\/574701108\/brush-with-death-leads-doctor-to-focus-on-patient-perspective\">Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The searing abdominal pain came on suddenly while Dr. Rana Awdish was having dinner with a friend. Soon she was lying in the back seat of the car racing to Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, where Awdish was completing a<span class=\"ellipsis\">&hellip;<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=66899\">Read more &#8250;<\/a><\/div>\n<p><!-- end of .read-more --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":794,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-medicine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/794"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=66899"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66899\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66901,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66899\/revisions\/66901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=66899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=66899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=66899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}