I was 14 when I was told that Dad was dying.<\/p>\n
I was sitting on the floor of our lounge. Mum said that she had some news. Sensing the worst, I fixated on the newspaper open in front of me, staring at an advert for German cut glass. It was cancer, in his pancreas, and he might only live a few more months.<\/p>\n
They were going to try an operation, she told me and my sister, to reduce the pain. As a nurse, she must have known that this was unlikely to work, but she knew her audience and didn\u2019t want to overload us with information. She must also have known that pancreatic cancer has one of the bleakest outlooks, due in part to a lack of symptoms in the early stages. By the time you start to notice the nausea, jaundice or weight loss, it\u2019s too late to hope that it\u2019s something less serious.<\/p>\n
That night, as I wrote my diary, I could think only about how I felt. Reading it back now I wonder what it was like for my mum, still reeling from the news herself and having to tell the rest of us.<\/p>\n
As a doctor, Kate Granger often deals with discussions of bad news and end-of-life issues. But there\u2019s another reason the subject interests her. Three years ago, at age 29, she was diagnosed with a very rare and terminal form of cancer that affects soft tissue. She\u2019s spoken and written widely about her experiences living with a terminal disease. She spearheaded the\u00a0#hellomynameis<\/a>\u00a0campaign, to get people working in the NHS to introduce themselves to every patient they meet. She\u2019s planning to live-tweet her own death.<\/p>\n Granger was diagnosed with cancer while on holiday in the USA. \u201cI came up against some tough episodes of breaking bad news when I got back to the UK,\u201d she says. \u201cWhen I got my MRI results, I was told when I was by myself by a junior doctor who didn\u2019t know what the plan was going to be.\u201d<\/p>\n In pain and alone, she was told \u201cwithout a warning shot\u201d that her MRI scan showed that the cancer had spread. \u201cHe was basically giving me a death sentence. He sort of couldn\u2019t wait to leave the room and I never saw him again.\u201d<\/p>\n Her experiences have shaped her as a doctor. \u201cI think I was a fairly compassionate, empathetic doctor, but having been through all I\u2019ve been through, when I came back to work I was just so much more aware of how body language is really important, how you think about the impact of bad news on an individual more than just viewing \u2018telling Mrs Smith that she\u2019s got lung cancer\u2019 as a task.\u201d<\/p>\nReference:<\/h4>\n
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