First Living

Abstract

I had always wanted to be the kind of physician who is not afraid to be impacted by emotionally difficult cases. Yet I began to recognize how I had intellectualized my own uncle's diagnosis and death and how a demanding schedule had kept me from attending to my own grief. I recognized how my unaddressed grief was, in part, influenced by this informal curriculum of medical culture, and it could impact my future role as physician. When we fail to allow grief to occur in the hospital workplace, we become burned out and less able to care for ourselves and our patients. Death and dying are ubiquitous in medicine. Therefore, it is imperative to teach medical trainees how to acknowledge and attend to our own grief.After that patient's death, as a team, we were able to acknowledge and address its impact on all of us through a team debrief. It is through such conversations about difficult clinical scenarios and personal struggles that we can grow as future physicians and learn to better cope with the immense loss and suffering we bear witness to in medicine.

An Overview of This Year’s Trainee-Authored Letters to the Editor

“…If we do not talk about it, it will not change. 5 Another trainee, a medical student, recounted how the "informal curriculum of medical culture" 6 affected their ability to adequately grieve the death of a family member from metastatic pancreatic cancer. They realized that the medical culture needs to change to prevent burnout, which not only affects their peers but also their patients.…”