It was a day of rounding on my dialysis patients with routine monthly lab results in hand. My patient, Book of Eli Denzel Doppelgänger, was doing better. His last several months of adjusting to being on dialysis after years of hoping he would never have to, had been slow going. “I’m realizing that this is a life and death situation,” he said to me in those first few weeks after starting dialysis.
four stages
what we could have done
The old woman died. I heard she slept more and more of the days away until one day she stopped talking and eating in the awake moments. Then her breathing slowed and her breaths shallowed until she stopped breathing altogether.