Description
Book SynopsisHow is it possible for practitioners of the healing arts to cope with the deaths of children and the devastating grief of their families? This book focuses on the grieving process of physicians and nurses for their child patients. It provides information to those already in the medical profession.
Trade Review"This book by Dr. McKelvey is as important and valuable as any I've ever read. It is such a pleasure to read, no matter the melancholy moments in the stories told, and will appeal to a general audience as well as a medical one. I will with some passion urge this book on everyone I know. It's a major effort of mind, heart, and soul, conveyed to us lucky - and needy - colleagues with splendidly poignant and penetrating prose. I wish my one-time teacher (and hero), Dr. William Carlos Williams, were with us today. He'd clap his hands with gusto and say, 'Hurrah!'" - Robert Coles, Harvard Medical School "An original book, distinguished by the author's obvious depth and breadth of knowledge. His profound familiarity with this subject enables him to explain complexities of medical and nursing practice and intraphysic processes of grieving with great simplicity. His cases and analyses resonate with truth. I would put a copy in every physician on-call room and nursing staff lounge in any pediatric hospital." Catherine Fiona Macpherson, School of Nursing, University of Washington
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. Residents
1. "The patient dies and that's it, next patient!"
2. "They came into the hospital with a daughter and they left with a small blue box of her stuff."
3. "What prevents us from being 'midwives of death,' something that has always been the physician's role?"
4. "What could you say? It wasn't all right. Her beautiful only child was going to die."
5. "I can't remember a time that we got together and talked about our feelings. Men don't do that."
Part II. Attending Physicians
6. It's my job to get families through the worst time in their lives."
7. "Coping with death is a process; you find your own way."
8. "It's not about me, it's about the patient."
9. "People don't know how long the pain from the death of a child lasts. It takes years."
10. "I love caring for young families and six babies."
11. "I know I'm not God, but I always try to save them."
Part III. Nurses
12. "No one understands what we do and no one can empathize with what we're going through except us."
13. "I've seen way too many dead babies."
14. "Being faced daily with the fact that life is temporary and unpredictable seriously affects the way I live."
15. "There's nothing right about a dead baby."
16. "You can't open your heart to everyone and be grieving all the time."
Conclusions
Appendix A. Interview Questions
Appendix B. Survey of Prior Research
Abbreviations
Bibliography
Index
