http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd.dir/lesser.dir/lesser_3.html (Einblicke ins Internet, 10/1995)
The chief of the pediatric nephrology section is with his staff for a conference about inpatients at the university medical center. A large group involved in the treatment of children -- nurses, social workers, physical therapists, nutritionists, dialysis specialists, and kidney transplant administrators -- discuss the week's progress of each child in the unit. "Dialysis can be done at night. With peritoneal dialysis one can hook oneself to the machine and in the morning go to school. Transplantation has improved markedly. Cyclosporin really changed that world, and the survival of kidney grafts has increased remarkably," the physician reports. "Years ago the staff caring for children with failing kidneys would often lose their bearings with the hopeless suffering and deaths. Today this is a cheerful, upbeat meeting."
I draw a very ill young woman in the Department of Transfusion Medicine at the National Institutes of Health. The apheresis treatment has failed twice. She is smiling and laughing! "Why is she laughing?" I wonder what she has to laugh about! Then I realize that she is viewing a comedy film on the tiny television set over her bed. How kind -- she has an hour's release from worrying. The chief surgeon of the National Cancer Institute, who is this patient's doctor, tells me about a similar patient who wrote a little essay that started with "I died today." The poem talked about how she wasn't going to see her children grow up. "It was poignant and so sad because it was true. It keeps your priorities in order when you are doing the kind of research that I do. We never forget why we are doing it," the doctor said.