Family Doctor

It is difficult to conceive of the sin of a doctor whose father died from an undetected blood clot traveling from his leg to the lung. This happened when his doctor son was thousands of miles away. But Dr. Phillip Lerner was suffering from such guilt. Tempting as it is to brush aside the responsibility to the surgeon who operated on a groin hernia, actually it is Dr. Lerner who took his father's death harder than anyone. The thing that bothered Dr. Lerner most was that his father had a hernia repaired on the other side a few weeks before the final operation. The second hernia was not discovered until a postoperative check.

Those of us working as doctors and looking after family members had a sense that we should be doctoring our family, and we were. De facto. This is mentioned in a book written by Dr. Lerner's son. Entitled The Good Doctor, the book is filled with moving accounts of how Dr. Lerner lived up to his duty as a revered clinician at the same time of looking after family.

The situation becomes terrible, of course, when things go wrong. Here's why: Dr. Lerner wondered if the second hernia had been there all along. "If I'd found out that’s the case, my daddy would have had only one operation to fix both of them. If that had happened, he might not have died." Not surprisingly, he never forgave himself for urging his father to get the second hernia operation. "Perhaps the clot formed because my daddy had undergone two operations within such a short time."

For reasons I cannot remember, my mentor confided in similar view and believed that he was to blame for his father's death from pulmonary embolism, too. Like so many other doctors, I asked my daddy come to see me when he mentioned low back pain for recent three weeks. I don't know if my father is proud of what his son dares to do – to take charge when illness hits home – but I know I am.