Kicking Cancer’s Ass — Episode 54: Dr. Monique Nugent
Why a stranger is often the choice to deliver hard news
A man sat next to his wife in the ICU. She was on a ventilator, dying, far too young for any of it. He turned to the doctor he had known for all of three days and asked her to be the one his family would hate. Tell the in-laws. Tell the kids. Let me not be the one who says it.
That doctor is Dr. Monique Nugent, a hospitalist, and on this week’s episode she told me she said yes without flinching.
Dr. Monique Nugent understands something most of us are never told: the person who delivers the hardest news in a hospital is almost never your oncologist. It’s a stranger. And there is mercy in that.”
The Burden of Truth
Monique is a kindred spirit (with a lot more education than me). We are both people who have walked into rooms nobody wants to be in and decided to tell the truth there. What surprised me was how often families ask her to carry the unbearable sentence for them.
“A spouse who can’t say it. A patient who can’t tell their kids. They hand it to the interloper, the one who will be gone by tomorrow, because you cannot disappoint someone who isn’t staying.”
Conversations on Medical Time
We talked about why patients confess to strangers what they hide from the people they love. We talked about “medical time,” and the single question to ask before you let a diagnosis stampede you into a decision you didn’t have to make yet. And we both ended up crying, on mic, over the things people say at the very end.
There is a moment when Monique names what families most need to hear after a patient finally says, “I’m done.” They are not giving up. The subscriber article goes there, and somewhere harder. It also goes to my grandmother, and the afternoon she gave away her tennis racket and told my grandfather exactly who to love after she was gone.
That story is for paid subscribers this week, along with the research on why “fight” might be the wrong word for any of this.
Prescription for Admission - https://drmoniquenugent.com/podcast/
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