Medical Student Reflections on Palliative Care Experiences

Every patient in the hospital is teaching you something. Sometimes that is the clinical stuff - signs, symptoms and other salient points. Sometimes, it is how their treatment affects them and sometimes it is just the bits of their life story you get by sheer osmosis. Palliative care patients teach you big picture stuff. The value in gentleness. The lengths of sacrifice people go to for partners, parents and the people they love. What a good life and what a good death looks like. Super light, obviously.

The patient I remember most was a 60-ish year-old lady. The summation of a very long battle with cancer in the notes read metastatic cancer, for end-of-life care. She was funny, loved magnolias and hedonistically sweet desserts. She was also ready to die. Sanguine is how she described the feeling.

She deteriorated quickly over the time I was there. Her family started to arrive as it became clear that now was the time. And her family kept arriving. And they kept arriving, and kept arriving. By headcount, there were twenty people with her before she passed. One of her sisters had brought sandwiches to feed a steadily growing army of people who absolutely, categorically adored this woman. She was so beloved her deathbed had to be catered. Her family and friends spent their time swapping stories about her - flipping between giggles, belly laughs and sobbing. They held her hand, kissed her forehead.

I saw what a good death was. This was subserved by the mechanics of palliative care - the medical management behind the scenes which meant she passed peacefully and without pain. Equal parts pharmacology, patient-focused healthcare and weapons grade communication skills. The other factor is the good life that preceded this. If we have to go some time, I don’t know if I could ask for more.

Third Year Medical Student

---

The man died in the morning, and I examined him at lunchtime.

I expected my first encounter with death in the flesh to be confronting and unreal. But truth be told, I did not think much about it. I went on with the rest of my day not thinking too much about what was happening in the morning.

The only thing that stood out to me was how his skin was so warm. How could someone be so warm yet not show any signs of life?

How strange, I thought. A body so warm, yet utterly still.

As if life had just stepped out for a moment, leaving the door ajar.

I told myself it was physiology. Muscle. Tissue. Residual heat.

But the mind is never satisfied with such clean explanations. Death resists definition. It is an abstraction dressed in silence; a concept that wears no face yet waits in every room.

Even now, while driving, while cooking, while laughing over drinks with friends, I catch something

a whisper in the wind,

a flicker in the corner of my eye,

a pause between thoughts

and there it is again.

Not grief, exactly. Not fear.

Just the quiet, ever-present hum of impermanence.

I find myself thinking about the man not just who he was, but that he was.

What dreams he dreamt. What mornings he believed he’d rise into.

And then I think of my own mornings

how easily I assume there will always be another.

In youth, time feels infinite. We live as if the clock will never strike its final hour.

But death, like a patient teacher, waits. And in its waiting, it teaches.

In healthcare, we speak of death the way we speak of taxes

an inevitability, stripped of its mystery.

We joke about it, perhaps to soften its edge.

But I wonder

How many of us truly feel alive?

How many of us move through days not realising we are breathing, blinking, becoming?

Oh! How many days have I lived unaware of the experience of living?

Third Year Medical Student