A midnight text message shattered the quiet of radiation oncologist Stacy Wentworth’s night, bringing news of a friend's dire diagnosis: Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML). The message, from her friend Chrissy, was delivered with a dark humor that belied the seriousness of the situation. "Got any tricks to cure acute leukemia, Dr. Wentworth?" Chrissy asked, prompting Wentworth to immediately offer her support, a move she later regretted for its potential overreach.
Professionally, Wentworth understood the grim prognosis for AML, noting that patients have less than a one in four chance of survival. As a physician, she was trained to temper optimism, but as a friend, she could only focus on hope. Her visit to Chrissy at the medical center where she works highlighted the complex emotional landscape she navigated, a space where the professional boundary of a doctor and the intimacy of friendship became increasingly indistinguishable.
Navigating the 'Loved One Standard'
Wentworth’s experience brought into sharp focus a recent directive from her employer: the "loved one standard." This principle calls for treating patients and their families with the same care and empathy one would wish for their own loved ones. While Wentworth had readily agreed with this aspirational goal in theory, confronting Chrissy’s illness revealed the profound challenge of applying it when the patient is someone she deeply cares for.
She recounted instances where the demands of her profession conflicted with her personal life, such as rushing from a patient's family to her child's softball game. This internal conflict led her to question her own capacity to uphold the loved one standard, especially when faced with the possibility of losing a friend. She considered advice from Dr. Erik Fromme, suggesting that physicians with family members as patients should consider actions that do not require a medical license. However, Wentworth found herself unwilling to abandon her most relevant skills in such a critical situation.
The Unseen Toll of Diagnosis
As she drove to her clinic, Wentworth reflected on how her own patients' diagnoses are relayed to their families. She wondered about the support systems in place for them, the individuals who sit beside them as they grapple with life-altering news. Her own interactions with patients—a farmer reminded her of uncles, a young artist of her stepdaughter, a mother of Chrissy—underscored her attempts to provide compassionate care, yet she acknowledged the inherent distance in these relationships.
"I’ve tried, sometimes desperately, to provide the loved one standard to each of them," she wrote. "And yet, I know that they are not my loved ones. I do not rub their backs as they vomit or wait anxiously with them for the results of a test. I do not wonder how they will tell their daughters that mom might die."
A Friend's Final Days
Over the next two weeks, Wentworth visited Chrissy multiple times. A subsequent text message alerted her that Chrissy had been transferred to the ICU, with doctors suspecting an intracranial hemorrhage and noting low platelets. Wentworth lay in bed, picturing the city landscape outside the ICU windows, miles away from the heartbreaking reality unfolding there. She learned of Chrissy’s death as monitors in the ICU faded to silence.
Reflecting on her friend’s passing, Wentworth articulated her hope that Chrissy's doctors had pushed past fatigue and personal concerns to focus entirely on her care. She wished for them to have embraced Chrissy as their own loved one, a sentiment that echoed her plea to God as she headed to her own waiting patients: "Please take care of MY loved one."