Survivor Saturday--When A Patient Dies

Last week, I received a text from my husband during his call shift that essentially read, "Can you come to the hospital for a visit? And bring food?". I'm used to these types of communications from him, especially when his calls keep him at the hospital and he's too busy to grab dinner from the cafeteria. My son and I put together some leftovers, hopped in the car, and trekked on over to Daddy's work. When we got there, I could tell he was very happy to see us, and I wondered why. We made our way to the call room, and as soon as the door was closed, he related the story of his first case that morning. He had received a text from the doctor on the previous shift asking if he could come in early to help her. She was swamped. When he got there, he immediately started watching a woman who had been progressing very slowly with her labor. He decided to do a Cesarean section when the baby's heart rate dropped a couple of times. Although everything looked routine and the baby came out crying and appeared healthy, it almost immediately "crumped", as the OBs put it, meaning it had coded. The on-call pediatrician and another who happened to be the hospital worked on the baby for an hour, but could not revive it. My husband was devastated. In his eight years of medical training, he's seen many types of deaths, including many fetal demises. However, there was always some reason why the baby died in the womb or soon after birth. This was, quite possibly, the first time he'd ever witnessed the death of a child who appeared to be completely healthy on delivery. There had been no indications up to that point that anything was wrong with it, and although he thought he had done everything possible to deliver the baby successfully, he could not figure out why it had died. As he told me the story, I could see the heartache in his eyes. It really hurt him, partly because a child he had delivered died, but I think also because he didn't have a solution to the problem. When our spouses train to become doctors, they learn how to look at their patients closely, diagnose their illnesses, and fix them as best they can. Unfortunately, not everyone can be fixed, and sometimes, the totally unexpected happens. I don't know how physicians are trained to deal with such situations, but my husband did what he thought best for his own mental state. He assisted the other doctor from his practice who was still there during another Cesarean and delivered a healthy baby with her. She told him that he didn't have to help her, but he said he really needed to be there when a healthy baby came into the world, and he had something to do with it. It was his way of coping. He ended up delivering several other babies that day, and even though each of those cases helped him feel better about his abilities and about the world, it helped him even more when my son and I showed up to give him a little support that evening. I really didn't know what to say to him, so I just gave him a sympathetic hug and patted him on the shoulder. I think just being able to talk about the situation helped him immensely, and I came to realize how important my role as his spouse was to him that day. No matter how much I might feel resentful about his call hours and how often he's away from me and my son, I have to remember that we're still a very important part of his life and that he needs us for encouragement and support when his job gets rough and he's exhausted. I'm sure there will be more instances in the future when he won't be able to fix a situation, and I hope that he turns to me in his time of need like he did last week.
On a side note, my husband did find out later through autopsy that the baby had a heart defect. I think he felt better knowing there was a reason for its death, but he was very stressed about the situation until he had an answer.