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Pauline Chen on empathy (and the lack thereof)

Posted on September 26, 2008

Taking Time for EmpathyAfter examining her father, I stepped out of the room to join the other surgeons viewing his CAT scans. As we crowded around the pictures, the tumor emerged a dark circle in the middle of the man s liver. View after view, the circle seemed only to widen, an ominous black hole that threatened to swallow what little normal liver was left.I wanted to scream for the man and his daughter. Instead, I whispered a series of expletives directed at the tumor, then stepped back into the examining room, bracing myself for what would be a hard and, I believed, long conversati...

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liver , tumor