“Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.”
Rudolph E. Reichert, MD, one of my mentors
(but attributed also to many others)
The book begins with Dr. Roberts finding a note from a nurse on a very difficult patient’s hospital room door, telling him not to go into the room. Finding the nurse, he learns the patient is upset with him and does not want to see him; the nurse strongly cautions him to stay out of the room. The patient is a very angry man with a recent, severe heart attack. Dr. Roberts agrees to transfer the patient’s care to another doctor, and goes to inform the patient, who runs out of the room into the hallway, falls over, and dies. Efforts to resuscitate him fail, leaving Dr. Roberts to wonder what he might have done differently over the past forty-eight hours.
In the next chapter, we look back two days, to learn this is the first week of Dr. Robert’s career as a new attending physician. We go with him as he sees the patient the day prior to his death. The visit goes poorly, as the patient is upset about his inhaler and Dr. Roberts cannot determine why.
After the patient dies, Dr. Roberts is initially convinced his career is coming to an end, only a week after it has finally started, the culmination of twenty-three years of formal education. His confidence and self-assertiveness are challenged, and he struggles to talk to the nurse, the patient’s family, and then his colleagues. We learn from the pathologist doing the autopsy that the patient could not be resuscitated because his heart has literally exploded.
The Angry Man whose Heart Exploded...
