Abstract
[This is an excerpt.] In 2017, my husband suffered a critical illness. He is also a physician, and during the course of his short stay at our local hospital, the doctors caring for him—his colleagues—were distant and impassive in the face of his extremis. They delayed his transfer, despite my urgent requests, until his next option for treatment was extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, a therapy not offered at the small facility. They were caring people and not reckless physicians, so their stonewalling and what felt like brinkmanship with my husband’s life seemed out of character. But their inaction stuck with me because of how unsettling and inexplicable it was, given what I knew of them, and of medicine. If asked what was wrong, they might have said they were burned out, because there was no other language for their experience at the time. But to me, their struggle seemed different. It seemed like their hands were tied, as though without accurate language, they were resigned to a situation they couldn’t articulate and therefore could not solve. [To read more, click View Resource.]
