With Great Sadness...

It is with great sadness that I share the news of losing of patient. In accordance with HIPPA laws, I will not elaborate much, but I hate this part of my job. The occupational hazard: that one will have patients that die. Inevitable. Yet, always awful.

Maybe at some point, I will talk about all the patients that have died while under my care, whether the typical psychiatric issue of suicide, or previously existing medical conditions.

For now, this really hurts.

I am also achieving some weird professional milestone with this particular person. This is the first patient of mine to have passed in my private practice. At all my other institutional jobs, there is always the system that takes care of letting the family know (when outpatient) and I have never had a patient die as a 'real doctor' while I worked at a hospital. The process is usually shared with nurses, social workers...etc, and I never actually called the family (since I practice adult psychiatry, family usually does not get that involved and administrators usually make that phone call.) However, this time, I am it.

I did meet with the family, we processed the events of these last few weeks, and I cried. I am just so sad...

In honor of my patient, this blog will be silent until next week.

One more thing, I never had the pleasure of a casual run-in with this person... Our potentials for run-ins were cut short...