A dose of feel-good to kick off the weekend.
When Daniela J. Lamas, MD, scheduled a bronchoscopy for a 70-year-old former mechanic with a penchant for a good stout, she promised him a Guinness when he got home.
However, the bronchoscopy didn't yield definitive results for the patient, who had metastatic cancer and trouble breathing, Dr. Lamas wrote in The New York Times. Her patient had colon cancer that had traveled to his liver and lungs, and possibly had pneumonia. His orders were NPO, or "nothing by mouth," according to the report.
His health didn't improve, and he told Dr. Lamas "his mouth was dry, like a desert," she wrote. When he decided against further medical care, Dr. Lamas told the medical student she was working with they needed to go on a beer run.
Dr. Lamas and the medical student returned with a Guinness Extra Stout in a brown paper bag, and with the permission of the patient's wife and nurse, they closed the curtains and had a toast.
The patient died a few days later.
"Now, years out of medical school, when I think about being a doctor, I think of adrenaline and a rush of decisions and that hope of saving lives. But I also think of that moment in the hospital room — love, a smuggled beverage shared around a bed, alarms silenced, curtains closed," she wrote.
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