A Doctor Who Became Afraid of Death - Drped

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A Doctor Who Became Afraid of Death

drped<br>Aug 19, 2026

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Most of the children whose names I remember are dead.<br>I first noticed this near the end of my first year of residency.<br>There was A, who received CPR for six hours after being brought into the emergency department following a car accident.<br>There was B, one of the few babies in the NICU we actually knew by name. Most of the others were still identified by their mother’s name rather than their own. B had been there long enough that everyone knew the name.<br>There was C, who did not have a name until one had to be written on the death certificate.<br>There was D, whose name became impossible to forget because we went through the chart over and over after the child deteriorated so quickly, trying to find the thing we might have missed.<br>And there was E, whose name I heard every four hours for nearly a month as the nurses called out intake and output while the child remained brain-dead.<br>The longer I trained, the more I noticed the pattern.<br>If I remembered a child’s name, chances were that child had died.<br>After a while, I stopped using names when I talked about patients.<br>I would say the three-month-old with sepsis. The child with acute myeloid leukemia. Age and diagnosis. Nothing more.<br>At first it was almost a superstition. I had this irrational feeling that saying a child’s name out loud might somehow tempt fate.<br>Then it became something worse.<br>The moment I learned a name, the child became a real person to me. Someone specific. Someone I could picture.<br>And somewhere in my mind I began to believe that once I cared too much, that child would be taken away.<br>It sounds absurd when I write it down, but medicine produces its own strange superstitions.<br>Sometimes the harder you try to make everything go perfectly, the more frightened you become that something terrible will happen precisely because you cared so much.<br>That fear stayed with me for years.<br>Pediatrics is different from many other parts of medicine.<br>In most departments, a patient dies and the hospital keeps moving. People feel it, of course, but the entire ward does not stop.<br>In pediatrics, sometimes it does.<br>I remember a child who died after a long course of chemotherapy.<br>When the funeral was held, some of the junior nurses from the ward went to pay their respects. Technically, they were supposed to be working, but nobody stopped them. The charge nurse quietly covered for them.<br>One of my colleagues, someone who seemed born to be a pediatrician, always called that child “our little rascal.”<br>She was off duty when she heard what had happened. She came back anyway.<br>At the funeral, she cried so hard she could barely stand.<br>I could not make myself go inside. I stayed behind the building and dug at the dirt with my shoe.<br>One of the senior residents stood by a hallway window overlooking the gathering and stared outside for a long time without saying anything.<br>When a patient dies, the people who cared for that patient are hurt too.<br>Some show it. Some disappear into a room and reread the chart compulsively, looking for the moment when the story might have gone another way.<br>Others become strangely calm. They joke. They talk about work. They behave as though nothing has happened because that is the only way they can keep functioning.<br>A parent who loses a child experiences a kind of grief that I would never pretend to understand.<br>But the doctor who tried to save that child and failed can fall apart too.<br>There is guilt and helplessness, and there is the question that comes back again and again:<br>What did I miss?<br>Could I have done something differently?<br>The doctor’s grief is not the same as the parents’ grief. It should never be compared as though they were equal.<br>But it is still grief. It is another piece of the same tragedy.<br>I understood why grieving parents became angry.<br>If you watch your child die, anger has to go somewhere. Sometimes it goes toward the disease, sometimes toward God, sometimes toward yourself, and sometimes toward the doctor and the hospital.<br>That is human.<br>What began to disturb me was what happened next.<br>It seemed as though we had become very good at taking that anger and giving it a target.<br>The intention to save the child, the uncertainty, the circumstances, the long hours of trying—all of it begins to disappear.<br>What remains is one decision made in a few minutes, one sentence in the chart, one test that was not ordered, one specialist who was not present, one judgment made before anyone knew how the story would end.<br>Then everything is reconstructed backward.<br>Why wasn’t this done sooner? Why wasn’t that test ordered? Why wasn’t the patient transferred? Why wasn’t a subspecialist called? Why wasn’t the family told more?<br>Eventually, the death stops being understood as a loss and becomes a search for negligence.<br>Someone must have done something wrong. Someone must be responsible. Someone must pay.<br>And the wound is opened again.<br>I...