 What is up, YouTube? Today we are going to talk about something a little different. We're going to talk about death and how physicians deal with death. It's something all physicians deal with almost on a daily basis. So I think someone should talk about it. Let's go. Approach this by giving you guys three experiences I had throughout my medical journey and how they kind of affected me. The first experience I had was when I used to volunteer at an emergency department in a large academic city hospital. As a volunteer in that ER, I had the ability to kind of just do whatever I wanted. Anytime a trauma came in I was allowed to go into the trauma bays and watch. The experience I remember the most is when there was a gang fight somewhere outside of the city. One of them was shot through the head. He was actually wheeled and through the ER on a gurney and the paramedic was giving chest compressions on the gurney as they were wheeling him through and into the trauma bay. They continued chest compressions for a good 20 or 30 minutes and eventually they called the time of death and they wrapped the patient in a new blanket and they called the family in to come and say their goodbyes. What I saw then was something I'll never forget. It was a father, a mother, and a grandmother who all walked in the trauma bay and this was the first time they were able to see their son or grandson in this condition. The mother and the grandmother immediately dropped to their knees once they saw their son and they started hysterically bawling right there in the trauma bay. I still happen to be in the trauma bay at that time and gotten to witness all this and it was something I've never seen before in my life and it's something that I will never forget. I still to this day could not imagine what it's like for them to see their son in that condition. It was a unique experience that you oftentimes hear about on the news and whatnot but you never actually get to experience it yourself. Words can't describe the pain that this family must have been feeling seeing their son like that. And it obviously made an impact on me as well because here I am sitting here talking about it and that was like 10 or 12 years ago. The second experience I had with death was the very first day of medical school. As most of you guys already know, a lot of med schools in the U.S. and outside of the U.S. use cadavers to teach medical students anatomy. I'll never forget my first day of med school walking into our anatomy lab which is well lit and very like your typical sterile lab and there was just rows of bodies in body bags. It was definitely so quiet in the room when everybody walked in there for the first time because none of us has ever witnessed this before. We were all dreading the inevitable which was when they finally told us to zip up that body bag and see what was under it. So they eventually told us to unzip the bag and reveal our cadaver that we'd be working on for the next 12 weeks or so. Nobody actually wanted to unzip the body bag, so I decided I would just be the one to do it. So I unzipped the body bag and there it was the first time I've ever seen a dead body sitting in front of me. For me it was beneficial to think of it as a tool and not an actual person because the second you kind of think of it as an actual person or that someone that lived an entire life you start to develop an emotional connection and it's kind of hard to be thinking that when you're cutting up that person up and trying to examine all the anatomy in their body. It actually never affected me like I thought it would because it was almost like a learning experience and you get used to it. You did it every single day for 12 weeks and it just becomes normal practice to you. The only part I actually didn't like was eventually when we got to the head and neck region we had to actually work on the face. You can tell a lot from a person's face and at that time it was the only time I ever felt kind of an emotional connection with my cadaver. Like I was thankful for them to give me the opportunity to work on them and to learn and become a better doctor. At the end of that 12 week anatomy course we had a ceremony to honor the cadavers and their families. This was also an amazing experience because you actually got to learn about your cadaver and learn about their family and they would tell you what type of person they were and it makes you kind of feel very appreciative of the fact that they donated their body to science. Now I know what you guys are thinking, Michael you're in radiology. You don't even see patients. How could you experience death with patients when you're a radiologist? But there's actually an experience that stands out the most for me. So my third experience is actually in radiology residency. This happened a few years ago when I was on call. Amidst my hundreds of studies over the 12 hour night shift I came across a CT head of a 105 year old woman and it looked kind of like this. I'll show you. So obviously this isn't the patient's actual CT skin so you can see on the left here all this area of hyper dense fluid or hyper dense structure in the left brain with extension into the ventricles. That's all hemorrhage. So this is a giant catastrophic hemorrhagic stroke and this is what it looks like on CT. This isn't the patient's CT but it looks very similar to this. So when I see this kind of CT the next thing I do is immediately call the emergency medicine provider and let them know the results. In this case I actually spoke to an emergency medicine resident and told her that this patient was suffering a massive left hemorrhagic stroke. The patient was about 105 years old or so and this is the first time she's ever been in the hospital in her entire life. The resident was telling me on the phone that she was speaking with the family at bedside and they were telling her all the great things about this woman and that she lived such an amazing life. She brought so much joy into all her kids and grandsons, etc. and she's been healthy for 105 years and the only thing that could bring her down was this massive hemorrhagic stroke. So the resident and I hung up the phone because she obviously had to go see more patients in the ER and I had to get back to reading the studies on my list. But after I hung up the phone I kind of sat there for a minute because I was thinking to myself, we don't even have time to think about a patient who just died because we have to get back to work. And it shouldn't be that way. But I guess that's just the product of medicine. Everything is now, now, now, now and there's increasing demand for all things in medicine, seeing patients faster, reading studies quicker, that it doesn't even give doctors any time to actually sit there and think about what just happens in front of them. So ultimately how do doctors deal with death? I think the answer to that is everybody deals with it differently and every patient's death impacts each doctor differently. There's a reason I remember these patients from over a decade ago and I think that's a good thing. As physicians we have the ability to take care of patients along the entire spectrum of life and ultimately death. And I don't think we should take that lightly. We are fortunate enough, we are lucky to be able to do that. And it's one of the many reasons why I became a doctor. So on that note, I hope you guys enjoyed this video. I know it's a little different than usual, but I thought I would share this side of medicine as well. If you have any questions, leave a comment below. If I like it, I'll respond to it. Make sure you smash that like and subscribe button right now. Follow me on Instagram if you don't already. And I will see you guys on the next video.