Mrs. Hattie Jones: The Patient I Can't Forget

Feb 28, 2023

Listen to ASCO’s Journal of Clinical Oncology essay, “Mrs. Hattie Jones” by Dr. Eric Klein, fellow at Stanford's Distinguished Careers Institute. The essay is followed by an interview with Klein and host Dr. Lidia Schapira. Klein shares the mystery of why Mrs. Hattie Jones might have died when she did.

TRANSCRIPT

Narrator: Mrs. Hattie Jones, by Eric Klein, MD (10.1200/JCO.22.02405)

That Hattie Jones died was not unexpected, but why she died when she did has been a mystery for more than 40 years.

It was late summer and she’d been hospitalized for several weeks when I met her, as it were. In the era before a palliative care subspecialty was established, patients with incurable cancer like Mrs Jones were admitted for inevitably long hospital stays characterized by slow declines in form and function, managed by trainees like me, the least experienced and least expert on the team. The chief resident on the service, burly and gruff, brought us into her private room early on the first day of my rotation on the colorectal surgery service. Mrs Jones appeared malnourished and frail, with one intravenous (IV) bottle hanging and concentrated urine collecting in a bag at the bedside. She did not, in fact could not, acknowledge our presence or answer our queries as to her well-being or needs because of an induced somnolence by the morphine running continuously in the IV. She breathed regularly but slowly and did not seem to be in distress. The goal in caring for her, we were told, was simply to keep her comfortable until she died. She was the first terminally ill patient I’d cared for, and her isolation and unresponsiveness filled me with sadness and unease.

Alone on afternoon rounds later that day, I was surprised to find someone sitting beside her bed holding her hand. The visitor was a sturdy woman a few years younger than Mrs Jones, dressed neatly and respectfully as though she were in church. She looked at me and said, “I’m Hattie’s sister, and I’m here to be with her when she dies.” Her demeanor conveyed a sense of duty both to her sister and herself, and her solemnity evoked a divine presence. I introduced myself and answered her many questions about her sister’s condition. 

“Was she in pain?” It did not seem so, I replied. “Would she ever wake up?” I explained we could wake her up by turning down the morphine but that she would likely be in pain if we did. She considered that silently for a few moments and said she did not want that, although she longed to hear her sister’s voice again. “Was she getting enough nutrition?” The IV also contained sugar water with enough calories for her condition, I explained. She said she missed her sister’s smile. “How long is she going to live?” I admitted that even experienced physicians could not predict that. She was silent after that and after a few minutes I excused myself to tend to other patients.

The days turned into weeks, then months, as the daylight hours grew shorter and the weather cooler and the fall slowly turned into winter without much change in Mrs Jones’ condition. I’d greet her on rounds each morning, never eliciting a response, briefly examine her, write new IV orders, and move onto the day’s work—rounding on patients being prepped for or recovering from surgery, then outpatient clinic, the operating room, and new patient admissions. Each afternoon Mrs Jones’ sister was there by her side for several hours, watching her intently, holding her hand, and sighing sadly. Each day she reminded the team “I just want to be with her,” she said, “so she will not be alone when she passes.”

Days on call for me were generally stressful and lonely, testing my medical knowledge and incompletely developed sense of empathy. As interns and newlyweds, my wife and I had call schedules that did not match—she every third night and me every fourth, such that we only had one evening a week together that first year when neither of us was exhausted. I missed our days in medical school when we shared classes, had dinner together every night, and walked afterward to the local Baskin- Robbins; now we work in different institutions, with different hours, and rarely had enough energy in the evenings and on weekends to truly be present for the other.

I drew the short straw on my team in late December and was on call on Christmas Day. Because the operating room and clinics were closed, I made rounds later than usual and Mrs Jones’ sister was already at her bedside when I entered her room. She told me she came early because she was hosting her large family for an early afternoon Christmas dinner, a long family tradition. Over the months of Mrs Jones’ hospitalization, we’d developed a sense of each other, she trusting an inexperienced, young, and tired doctor trying to keep her sister comfortable, me seeing a devout woman dedicated to her sister’s soul. She asked, “Is it safe for me to leave Hattie alone for a few hours this afternoon so I can have Christmas dinner with my family?” and added that it would be the first without her sister’s presence in many years. I replied assuredly that it was, that her sister’s condition had been stable for many months and that I thought she was going to live for a least a few more weeks. She looked at her sister, then at me, gathered her coat and scarf, kissed Hattie goodbye, and headed home.

The rest of the day was relatively quiet for a day on call but typical for a holiday. There were a few patient phone calls, one or two patients to be seen in the emergency room, and no emergency surgeries. The hospital provided a free meal of turkey and sides to all the staff that were on call, and those of us in the cafeteria shared a sense of holiday cheer, albeit muted by being away from our own families. Despite the happy spirit there, I was lonely, missing my wife, and sad to have to postpone my own Christmas Day birthday celebration. While thinking about that I got what I thought was a routine call from the colorectal surgery nursing unit—perhaps about a patient needing a medication reorder, or a need to restart an IV, or to talk with a family about a hospitalized relative. Instead, the nurse on the phone summoned me to the unit to pronounce Mrs Jones dead. I paused for a long moment before asking, dreading the response: Was Mrs Jones’ sister back from Christmas dinner? “No”, came the answer. My tears flowed copiously and quickly; my heart hit the floor. I sobbed loudly for a few minutes, unable to explain to my colleagues what had transpired.

The walk from the cafeteria to the nursing unit seemed much longer than usual. I examined Mrs Jones for the final time and confirmed her lack of heartbeat and breathing. I watched as the nursing staff disconnected the IV, a lifeline that was no longer needed. I sat at the nursing station and filled out the death certificate. Name: Hattie Jones. Age: 63. Date and Time of Death: 1:23 pm, December 25, 1981. Cause of death: Cardiopulmonary arrest secondary to metastatic colon cancer.

I put down my pen and summoned the courage needed for my last task—telephoning Mrs Jones’ sister to share the news. I do not recall what I said, but I have a vivid memory of the reaction—she was initially silent and then I heard her cry, others in the background joining in when she repeated the news; I remain unsure to this day which one of us was more despondent.

Over the course of my career, I’ve pondered many times over the timing of Mrs Jones’ death. Perhaps she wanted her sister to be surrounded by family when hearing the news so that the burden of her sister’s grief would be lessened by sharing. Perhaps it was meant to serve as a poignant reminder about the need for and power of celebrating time with family. Perhaps it was for me to experience a sense of helplessness to deepen my empathy for those who were incurable. Perhaps it was all these reasons or perhaps none of them. No matter the reason, after a career caring for thousands of patients, seeing many suffer and die along the way, I have never experienced a sadder moment. Why Mrs Hattie Jones died when she did is an enduring mystery, but her memory, the profundity of the bond between these two sisters, and the empathy I learned from them have lived on and helped me navigate the emotional ups and downs intrinsic to the practice of oncology.

Dr. Lidia Schapira: Hello and welcome to JCO's Cancer Stories: The Art of Oncology, which features essays and personal reflections from authors exploring their experience in the field of oncology. I am your host, Dr. Lidia Schapira, associate editor for Art of Oncology and a professor of medicine at Stanford University. 

Today we are joined by Dr. Eric Klein, a fellow at Stanford's Distinguished Careers Institute and Emeritus Professor and Chair of the Glickman Urological and Kidney Institute at Cleveland Clinic. In this episode, we will be discussing his Art of Oncology article, ‘Mrs. Hattie Jones’. 

Our guest's disclosures will be linked in the transcript. 

Eric, welcome to our podcast and thank you for joining us.

Dr. Eric Klein: Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

Dr. Lidia Schapira: Let me start by asking you a little bit about your process for writing narratives. When do you write, and what kind of scenario triggers your desire to write?

Dr. Eric Klein: I haven't written anything creative like this since college, so I don't really have a process. But I can tell you the process I used for this particular piece. I had the real pleasure of being in John Evans' class. He's a faculty member at Stanford in the English department who taught memoir writing. And so the class was to teach us how to write memoirs, and it was filled with prompts, which was a wonderful way to respond, and it tapped into some creativity that I didn't know I had. 

So the prompt for this particular piece was to write about a secret or a mystery. And I thought about it for a day or two, and I thought, I have lots of secrets in my life, but I don't really want to share them with anyone. And I struggled with it. So I was having dinner with one of my classmates, Thanya, and just discussing this because she had taken the class, and she said, "Well, why don't you make it a mystery?" And it clicked immediately, as I have written, is that this mystery about why Mrs. Jones died when she did has stuck with me for more than 40 years. 

So that night, I was lying in bed trying to figure out how I was going to write this because I'm not a creative writer--tossing and turning. And about 1:30, I got out of bed, and I sat in our dark living room, and I tapped the story out on my iPhone, and I emailed it to myself, and I edited it the next day. And that was the process.

Dr. Lidia Schapira: Your essay has this very factual title, including the Missus, ‘Mrs. Hattie Jones’. And then it starts with this statement, "She died.” We know this, but her death is not unexpected. But the timing was. And that mystery has stayed with you for 40 years. It's a very impactful opening. I thought that was very creative, actually, on your part. Beautifully done. Tell us a little bit about why you have pondered for 40 years about the timing of Mrs. Jones' death.

Dr. Eric Klein: It was a very emotional event for me, in part because I was so young in my career. I had never taken care of terminally ill patients before. Nothing in medical school prepared me for that. There was no palliative medicine service at the time. And I think, as many social scientists have observed, is that things that happen to us when we're young, like our first love, always stick with us more firmly and more deeply than things that come later in life. So that's why it was so emotional for me, and I think that's why it stuck with me for so long. I didn't know how to deal with it at the time.

Dr. Lidia Schapira: Did you ever have a conversation with Mrs. Hattie Jones?

Dr. Eric Klein: Well, I tried. I certainly spoke with her sister a great deal, but Mrs. Jones was unresponsive, and that was by design. The morphine in the drip, and the IV drip was meant to keep her comfortable. I mean, we have learned a lot about palliative care in the intervening decades, so we don't do that anymore. But that was the standard of care then. Someone was in pain, and so you gave them enough narcotic medication to keep them out of pain, and whatever else happened downstream didn't matter. 

I'd say one of the other powerful things about this and sort of the key event of learning that her sister was not at her side when she died was that the whole goal of care was all focused on making that happen and facilitating things for her sister and keeping her up to date. And the nursing team was on board with that and so forth. I felt like it was a big team letdown that we let this woman down and we let her sister down.

Dr. Lidia Schapira: Let's talk a little bit about you at that very tender phase of your development. You're a young intern, and you've let your patient and the team down. How did you deal with that? And how have you since processed how you dealt with that?

Dr. Eric Klein: This was the saddest thing that's ever happened to me. It was the saddest thing at the time. And I think in reflecting upon my career, seeing many sad things, this still resonates with me as the saddest thing ever because of the deep personal disappointment that went along. I don't have clear recollection of how I dealt with it at the time. Probably I just was sad for a few days and moved on. I mean, being a surgical intern in 1981 was very busy. We didn't have a lot of the ancillary services that we have now. The surgical service was busy, and so we moved on day to day. 

This memory just popped up to me every now and then in quiet times and in discussions, in group discussions with colleagues about challenges that we faced in our career, and sometimes in talking to young people about careers in medicine and what you might experience and so forth. And so I guess I dealt with it intermittently through the years and ended up scratching my head. And finally, this was a cathartic experience for me to be in memoir writing, to be able to put this down on paper and, I hope, deal with it finally.

Dr. Lidia Schapira: You make a very powerful case for storytelling as part of a practice of dealing with situations that are so emotionally complex. Forty years later, what advice would you give a young intern who is also facing a moment of extreme personal sadness and grief, and disappointment?

Dr. Eric Klein: Yeah, my advice would be don't be stoic about it. That was certainly the expectation in the era that I trained. It was certainly the expectation for men. There weren't many women surgeons then, but that was certainly the expectation for men. People died—surgical mistakes happen—and we were just told it's part of the game. And I recall my chief of service telling me it puts hair on your chest. It sort of makes you a man, and so you just deal with it. 

So there are so many resources that are available now and a very, very different attitude about the personal part of being a physician and dealing with disappointment and other struggles and the learning curve and all of that. So I would say to youngsters, seek out help—seek out your colleagues who might have been through it. Seek out more senior people and seek out non-physician support people who are generally available at most medical centers and medical schools to help people deal with this, talk about it, and come to terms with it sooner than 40 years.

Dr. Lidia Schapira: I'm curious to know if you enjoy reading narratives written by other physicians that describe similar experiences of grief and loss.

Dr. Eric Klein: I always have. So the Art of Oncology, A Piece of My Mind in JAMA, and I edit a journal called Urology, and we have a section on narrative medicine. And I think that enriches the experience for the entire medical community and helps keep us focused on our real goal, which is caring for patients. And I think that's increasingly hard in the reimbursement-driven productivity era that we live in now. And that's why I think it's important to do that.

Dr. Lidia Schapira: How much have you shared about this creative, reflective side of yourself with your trainees over the years? 

Dr. Eric Klein: I hope it came through. I can't say that I know for sure that it did. I guess I was known during my career as a storyteller, and I would often share anecdotes usually related to more clinical which is facing this clinical problem and how do you deal with it surgically, how do you deal with it medically, that sort of thing. And maybe less about specific patients. So it's probably better to ask my trainees if I did a good job with that.

Dr. Lidia Schapira: Let's go back to this idea that storytelling is very powerful to help us in communicating with each other and processing experiences. Do you use storytelling, or have you used storytelling with your patients in the clinic? 

Dr. Eric Klein: Yes, frequently. My career was mostly focused on prostate cancer, and so when I saw a new patient with prostate cancer, even if it was the most indolent kind, the very first question on their mind always is, "Am I going to die from my cancer?" And I would say I've seen lots of patients, and I'll tell you what the extremes are. I saw one patient with lymph node-positive cancer who's still alive 25 years after his initial treatment and living a normal life. And I saw one patient with really advanced cancer who died after 18 months. And I would say to them, "Your experience is going to be someplace in between those two stories." Or there might be a more specific situation of someone facing a particular treatment or surgery and they're concerned about that, and I would even hook them up with other patients who have been through it so that they could experience the story from the horse's mouth, so to speak. I think it's an important part of managing patients, I do.

Dr. Lidia Schapira: So let's talk a little bit about the language and the plot in those stories. What kind of metaphors do you use, if any? 

Dr. Eric Klein: Well, I had one patient tell me that I spoiled his taste for oranges because when I described the prostate, I described it like an orange with a rind or a capsule on the outside, and the cancers in the fruit in the middle. So that was one that didn't resonate ultimately. Then I switched to lemons since no one seems to like lemons and so forth. I would say the stories generally had a good outcome. Patients want their physicians to be optimistic, and certainly, patients facing cancer want their physicians to be optimistic. And I'm sure I had a lot of other specific stories to tell about specific patient experiences that don't come to mind readily now. 

Dr. Lidia Schapira:  What book have you read recently that you've enjoyed and would recommend to others?

Dr. Eric Klein: I would say Evil Geniuses, which is not a medical story at all. It's a story about the conservative political movement and the Federalist Society, and big business that set an agenda back in the Reagan era to take all the negativity around capitalism and conservatism out and to relax restrictions on business. And to fill the Judiciary with conservative judges and so forth, and how they have succeeded over the course of those decades to where we are now. I have to say I don't read much fiction. I honestly, I don't find fiction does much for me. I read mostly nonfiction. 

Dr. Lidia Schapira: You come across as somebody who is very self-aware, and I assume it's taken a long time to be able to say things about your feelings and recognize the impact some of these patient experiences have had on you. And in the essay, you also mentioned that your wife is a physician and that you spent a lot of time together in medical school, but then the paths diverged. And I'm interested in knowing if these sorts of stories about patients came to your dinner table. Tell us a little bit about that.

Dr. Eric Klein: Yeah, all the time. Actually, over the course of our careers, we would definitely share the highlights and the lowlights of our day and talk a lot about specific patients and the problems that they faced and what we learned from that. And I learned a lot from listening to my wife. She was a pediatric neurologist, so didn't deal much with cancer, but I learned a whole lot more about social determinants of health and how social circumstances really impact the patient's ability to cope with a serious diagnosis and recover from it and so forth. Because she dealt with children who came mostly from impoverished families and didn't have the same sort of family or social service support as the kind of patients that I saw, who were mostly Medicare or private insurance patients.

Dr. Lidia Schapira: I must finish this interview by asking you why you think Mrs. Hattie Jones died when she did.

Dr. Eric Klein: That's a great question. I think the most likely explanation, without really knowing her, but with knowing her sister and understanding the family dynamics, is that she really did not want her sister to hear the news when she was alone in the relatively impersonal environment of the hospital. Whether or not that's true, I don't know. But that's what I had chosen to believe, that she wanted her sister to hear the news when she was surrounded by her loved ones and her family. And I think that resonated nicely with the idea that I wrote about, which is being away from my family on Christmas Day and on my birthday and so forth, and being isolated and alone and how important family is to one's personal well-being and success.

Dr. Lidia Schapira: I like your interpretation. I find it both wise and compassionate. And with that, I want to invite you to share with our readers why you decided to send this story out into the world. I understand the reason for writing it. What made you decide to share it and publish?

Dr. Eric Klein: So let me start with a call out and a shout out to one of my other classmates, Julie, who convinced me to take memoir writing. My wife had taken it and had a good experience with it early in the DCI experience. And I was reluctant because I've only written clinical papers and scientific papers, and I just didn't sense that I had this creativity. So thank you, Julie, for convincing me. 

I shared it because of the reaction I got from my classmates. The dynamic in the class was to share it with a certain number of classmates, and then we were all asked to write a constructive critique of the stories that we've written so that we could get better in memoir writing. But the emotional reaction to this, to my non-physician classmates, was so powerful, and my own reaction to it in writing it. I just read over the proofs that came the other day, and I was crying again, even though I know the story well and have been over it many times, and I thought, "This is something that might resonate with other people. This might be a universal experience." And so it was more of a lark than anything else. But I just thought the world might get something useful out of this.

Dr. Lidia Schapira: Well, it resonated with your editor. One of the tests that I usually use when I read the manuscript is whether or not I'm getting teary or whether I'm feeling anything, and it certainly evoked a lot of emotion. So. Thank you, Eric. Thank you for sending it to us. 

So until next time, thank you for listening to JCO's Cancer Stories: The Art of Oncology. Don't forget to give us a rating or review, and be sure to subscribe, so you never miss an episode. You can find all of ASCO's shows at asco.org/podcasts.

The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions.  

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Guest Bio 

Dr. Eric Klein is a fellow at Stanford's Distinguished Careers Institute and Emeritus Professor and Chair of the Glickman Urological and Kidney Institute at Cleveland Clinic.