Word: cancerous
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...patient's name was Debbie, and she was dying of ovarian cancer. After two sleepless days, she was struggling to breathe, vomiting repeatedly from a drug meant to sedate her. The resident physician on call was roused from sleep and summoned to her bedside in the night. The doctor had never seen the emaciated, dark-haired figure before. "It was a gallows scene, a cruel mockery of her youth and unfulfilled potential," the doctor wrote later. "Her only words to me were, 'Let's get this over with.' " The resident took her exhausted plea literally and instructed a nurse...
...pain. But if the dose required to bring relief also happened to hasten the end of her life, that is something a physician could live with. Pediatrician Kathleen Nolan, an ethicist at New York's Hastings Center, reports that several of her young patients, suffering terribly from cancer, died in this way. Says Nolan: "There is no dishonor...
...J.A.M.A. account of Debbie's death also underscores a fact of medical life: terminally ill cancer patients often suffer unnecessarily because doctors hold back narcotics for fear their patients will become addicted -- even when they have only weeks or months to live. This casts doubt over the profession's reassurances that pain will be controlled. And the dread of unrelenting pain is one factor that may encourage patients and doctors alike to blur the line between letting death occur and causing...
...medication. She will return to Boston every three weeks for additional treatments, which last three days on the average, Laura said. Laura said her mother and father take turns staying overnight in the hospital. The other parent sleeps at a nearby Ronald McDonald House for families of children with cancer...
Katie was first diagnosed as having leukemia seven years ago and has been in remission since then. Last Wednesday when she suffered seizures, she was rushed to the new emergency room at Children's. But her seizures were diagnosed as a neurological disorder that is unrelated to cancer...