48. Watching the dying child 

Watching the dying child

• I was with him and his family at the final moment of his life. 

• When treating pediatric patients as a pediatrician, there were a few pediatric patients who died unavoidably even after all the best care and treatments in the world that both doctors and parents could do. 

• It was at this time that I had the most difficult situation and moment during my pediatric professional life for almost 6 decades. 

• Even with the best treatment, the deaths of especially three children among the 500 thousand patients seen by me during medical professional life. 

• I have watched a four-year-old child with acute leukemia who died while her parents were watching her in her bed at 2 am after being diagnosed and treated with the most famous and best-known Pediatricians in Pediatric Hospital in, Harvard Medical School in  Boston. 

• The death of a 12-year-old male patient with cystic fibrosis treated at Yale-New Haven Hospital, CT, US, dying in parents’ arm in front of his parents and siblings in the bed of a pediatric ward in a local hospital, Windham Hospital. 

• Several decades ago, I watched a boy with his mother in a pediatric ward at Seoul City Children Hospital. This boy was dying from the final stage of chronic renal failure for more than 7 years but I still remember them more vividly. I was with his mom at the last moment when a child left this world. 

• I quietly comforted their parents and their family until the moment the child passéd away. The moment was one of the precious healing arts. 

• After I hugged dying children and parents and I left silently.