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A Doctor's 'Soul' is Tormented By Medical Errors
Rita Rubin, USA TODAY
April 15, 2009
“The Cardiologist’s Tale” deals with “Joe Dennet,” who died about a decade ago, nearly 20 years after Zaret first met him. He was 57 at the time and had just had a major heart attack.
Dennet did well for 15 years but then had another heart attack and developed congestive heart failure, which worsened over the next four years. Finally, Zaret ran out of ways to control it.
But among the things doctors should never tell a patient, Zaret says, is “we don’t have anything else to offer you.” Even when doctors have no cures or treatments, he says, “we have lots to offer you in terms of comfort and support.”
So Zaret kept seeing Dennet weekly. “I hoped seeing him so often might strengthen his tattered spirits, even if a little,” the cardiologist in Nuland’s tale explains.
Dennet was dying, and Zaret racked his brain to come up with some way to ease the journey. At the end of one visit, he handed Dennet a sheet from a prescription pad. On it, Zaret had written: “One set of memoirs.”
In The Soul of Medicine, Dennet is a rare-books librarian at Canterbury University who had expressed regret that his stories about characters he had encountered would die with him. The real Dennet, Zaret says, had a different but equally distinctive profession.
“This new thought, this realization that he could do something he wanted to do, propelled him through,” Zaret says. “And when he concluded the memoir, he was ready to die.”
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