Want a nice thing – touching, even – from a little kid, also during surgery? (The kid was younger than sturob’s wannabe MD, that is . . .)
I started my oncology-research career working in pediatric oncology. While helping manage one trial, we got a family whose young daughter needed a bone marrow transplant. She was perhaps six years old. Her older brother – I think eight years old – turned out to be a good match. So the parents and we on staff sat down with the boy and explained that we could save the girl’s life with his help, and talked a bit about the surgery. The boy agreed, very solemnly as I remember, and a date for the surgery was set.
Later, as we prepared for the surgery, getting ready to put the young boy under to extract his marrow, he turned and said, “Will it hurt when I die?”
“What?”, asked a doctor, surprised.
So we talked to the little boy a bit more . . .
It turned out that this little eight year old had thought, for some time, that he was going to be killed to allow his younger sister to live. That we were going to sacrifice him, take some vital life force, and give it to his sister so she might live. And he had been perfectly willing to make that sacrifice, the entire time. He really thought he was going to die, and that his sister would live because of it, and that he’d been asked by his parents and doctors to make that sacrifice. And still, he said “yes”.
Oof.
There was a little constrained laughter as the situation was explained to him again (as well as it can be, to such a young kid), but more tears than anything as people realized what this kid had thought was going to happen. He was a brave, generous boy, and his parents were very proud thereafter (even more proud, I mean). It was probably the most moving moment I’ve experienced in my career, in which I’ve been lucky (or unlucky, depending on the direction of movement) enough to have a number of moving moments.
Anyway, maybe this can serve as an antidote to medical students who seem to be asking about nice ways to kill, rather than save, their patients. Although I’m a little conflicted in the euthanasia debate – still thinking my way through that briar patch – that does seem a little odd, for a student to ask that question during a surgery. Keep the keys away from her.
(a product used for euthansia…in animals)
