Scotch and Pizza: Humanizing Care in the ICU Made All the Difference

Listen to ASCO’s Journal of Clinical Oncology article, "Scotch and Pizza” by Dr. Paul Jansson, who is an Emergency and Critical Care Physician at the Brigham and Women's Hospital. The article is followed by an interview with Jansson and host Dr. Lidia Schapira. Dr Jansson share his perspective as a critical care physician and how one question can serve many purposes all at once.

TRANSCRIPT

Narrator: Scotch and Pizza, by Paul S. Jansson, MD, MS 

“Would you tell me about J?,” I asked. What was she like? I made eye contact with one of her sons, who looked back at me, somewhat puzzled. 

“You mean her illness?” he asked, quizzically. Immediately, I worried that I had lost the family,

all sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in the cloistered conference room. No, I responded, can you tell

me about J before the illness? What was she like? J came to the intensive care unit (ICU) in the early hours of the morning, only a few hours after making her way from the emergency department to the oncology ward. Admitted with a diagnosis of failure to thrive and dehydration, her CT scans made clear the extent of her cancer’s spread. Over the last few months, she had shown remarkable improvement with each serial round of palliative chemotherapy, beating the cancer back and holding it at bay, one round at a time, but it had now spread seemingly everywhere, despite medication, despite molecular testing and targeted treatment, and despite her tenacity.

Overnight, she became more and more confused, her electrolytes deranged from days of poor oral intake, now admitted to an unfamiliar environment. Her lungs, bearing the brunt of her disease, had further suffered over the week as she aspirated. As her breathing became more labored, a nasal cannula progressed to positive pressure ventilation. By early morning, she was unresponsive, and the early morning phone call to her family had led to a panicked reversal of her Do Not Resuscitate/Do Not Intubate order. And so she came to me, mechanically ventilated, blood pressure supported by an armada of vasopressors, her body failing, which brought us back to that small room.

We didn’t have the chance to get to know her before she got sick. I looked around the room, meeting their eyes. We only know her like this. What was she like before all of this?

In my first months of intern year in the ICU, I had seen this technique used in family meetings.

Initially, I adopted it as a matter of routine, copying the methods I had seen used by senior residents and attending physicians. As I came into my own as a physician, developing my own style, I began to see its value. It opened my eyes beyond the Comprehensive Flowsheet and the Results Review spreadsheet that scrolled into infinity. It showed me why I was doing what I was doing and who I was doing it for.

“She loved scotch and pizza.”

The room was silent, and we looked around. Her oldest daughter, a nurse herself by training, had broken the silence. Together, she clarified. I know it’s a weird combination, she said, but she loved scotch and pizza. It must have been something from college.

We all glanced around for a moment, making bewildered eye contact, before the entire room broke into laughter. 

“She made a mean coleslaw,” volunteered another brother. “And a great hot dog.”

“She was a fantastic mother,” reported the next.

“She was my soul.” Thus far, her husband had sat quietly in the corner, the face of stoicism. He was a retired physician, a self-described man of few words. A moment of silence as we all looked toward him, across a conference table, barren except for half-used boxes of tissues, surrounded by children on both sides. She was the best thing that could ever happen tome, he continued. Another long pause, until the words spilled forth. When I would leave her to go to work, I felt incomplete. When I returned home, I felt an immense sense of being at peace. When I was with her, I was calm. She made me whole. She was my soul. We sat in silence, the tears welling in my eyes, welling in all our eyes. She was everything that I was not. Kind. Patient. A fantastic cook. We laughed. Then, another long pause as he gathered his thoughts. And now I know what I need to do. 

In his stoicism, his silence, his love, he told us what we all needed to hear. As deeply as her loss would rend his soul, there was nothing more that I could do—that anyone could do—to bring back the woman who gave such life, and further treatment would only prolong her suffering. She died that afternoon, surrounded by her family, finally at peace. A chef for the neighborhood. A mother. A friend. A wife. A soulmate. And a lover of scotch and pizza.

Dr. Lidia Schapira: Hello, and welcome to JCO's Cancer Stories: The Art of Oncology, which features essays and personal reflections from authors exploring their experience in the field of oncology. I am your host, Dr. Lidia Schapira, Professor of Medicine at Stanford University. Today we're joined by Dr. Paul Jansson, an Emergency and Critical Care Physician at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and a member of the Harvard Medical School faculty in Boston. In this episode, we'll be discussing his Art of Oncology article, “Scotch and Pizza.” 

At the time of this recording, our guest has no disclosures. 

Paul, welcome to our podcast, and thank you for joining us.

Dr. Paul Jansson: Well, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here with you. 

Dr. Lidia Schapira: So first, let me ask a little bit about this essay and about your intended audience. This is a beautiful meditation, I would say, on a family meeting that takes place in the context of somebody with advanced cancer. What led you to write it? What led you to decide to share it, mostly with an oncology readership. 

Dr. Paul Jansson: This is a piece that I think wrote itself and it was something that came to me as I couldn't sleep in the hospital call room. I was on call the day after this family meeting and lying in the polyester sheets and listening to the air conditioning rumble, I couldn't sleep. And it just came to me all of a sudden that I had to write it, and I had to write it in this exact way. I was working an overnight shift in the intensive care unit, and at 5:00 a.m. sat down at the computer, and this just all poured out, basically, in the method in which it appears today. I think there were very minor grammatical changes, but it really just came out. It was a story that I feel that I needed to tell.

Dr. Lidia Schapira: So why do you think that this meeting and this family impacted you so deeply? I mean, there's a huge emotional connection here, and I introduced you as a critical care doctor, but you sound like a palliative care doctor to me here, sitting with a patient, basically just asking one question and then watching this loving scene unfold. And it struck me that it moved you. Did I get that right?

Dr. Paul Jansson: I think you're absolutely right. Brigham and Women's Hospital is the inpatient hospital for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. And so, by its nature, intensive care medicine at Brigham Women's is a lot of oncology care. And so you are absolutely right in that these conversations are very routine for us. But there was something about this family, the connection, that just stuck with me. I think with many of these conversations, it's relatively routine. It's certainly not routine for the families. But as an intensive care specialist, this is a relatively routine conversation. And to get this level of detail and humor and eulogizing on the part of her husband is really quite unusual and was very profound to me, sitting in that moment stuck with me.

Dr. Lidia Schapira: I was struck, Paul, by the fact that you asked one question, and immediately they're talking about her in past tense. She was. She loved. She did. Did that strike you in the moment as sort of showing that they actually knew exactly what was happening?

Dr. Paul Jansson: Yeah. I think there is a moment in these conversations where the family understands what is happening and what needs to happen. And it's, I think, best if the family gets there on their own and works really well in that goals of care setting. And I think the love that they were expressing for her and the admiration and the appreciation, that was really profound to me.

Dr. Lidia Schapira: One of the reasons why I love your piece is that it takes us from what we are now teaching as a goals of care discussion or a family meeting. And it brings us back more to the art of medicine, the joy of medicine, and the intimacy of these moments. This family was totally ready to accept you in their little circle and start to share things that were really very deep for them. Tell us a little bit about what it was like to be in the room with her husband, who's a retired physician, her daughter, who's a nurse, and the other family members who seem to be sort of helping one another to eulogize, as you said, in the most loving way, their almost gone mother and wife. 

Dr. Paul Jansson: I am not an oncologist, and I do not have the pleasure of these longitudinal relationships that many oncologists have developed over months and years and decades for some of these patient physician relationships. And so as an intensive care physician, it's a very quick and powerful bond that we are really forced to make with the families. And so I actually never talked with this woman. She was intubated on the night shift and was brought to the intensive care unit, intubated and sedated, and I never got to meet with her. I never got to sit in the office with her and discuss her hopes and her fears and her journey and all of those things that are really more the domain of the oncologist. But in our specialty, I have to really develop this relationship very quickly, where people will trust a life and death discussion with someone whom they've only known for 15 or 20 minutes in some circumstances. 

And so it really is a privilege and an honor to be granted this degree of trust and disclosure and openness about who the patient is and was in the life before I met her. And so sitting in that room, it's always very awkward to start. It's a converted conference room with some boxes in the corners, and there's only, as I wrote in the piece, a box of tissues on the table. And so very quickly, we have to go from, “Paul Jansson, I'm the intensive care doctor,” to these discussions of life and death, and how to negotiate this very fraught transition, I think is really the point that I think you're getting at in the art of medicine. And how do we go from 0 to not 0 to 60, but 0 to 100 with these really life and death decisions? And that's very difficult.

Dr. Lidia Schapira: In a flash.

Dr. Paul Jansson: Exactly. And far sooner than anyone wanted, I think, if any of these families. Everything is so sudden. I even wrote about this in the piece. She had a DNR, DNI in place, and they got the call at 03:00 a.m., 04:00 a.m. however early it was in the morning. And so you can really tell at that moment they were not expecting any of this. They were not ready for any of this. But unfortunately, we were in that circumstance.

Dr. Lidia Schapira: You know, Paul, when I hear you speak, I remember a friend of mine who is an actor and teaches doctors communication skills, and she basically says that doctors and actors have 90 seconds to develop rapport with their audience. And basically in your field or in the emergency room, this actually plays out every day. You're absolutely right, we in oncology often build these relationships, craft these relationships over time. And we probably know the names of all the people in the room and we would know what they do. But you're just kind of walking into the scene. Now that you've had a little time to reflect, do you know what it was that led them to reverse that DNR/DNI decision? Was it panic? Was it not knowing? I think as a reader, I'm struck with the fact that they had a plan, they reversed the plan, and then they quickly just came right back to what the original plan was. Maybe they hadn't expected this to happen so quickly. 

Dr. Paul Jansson: I think it's more common than we think it is, or perhaps it should be. And I think every family has a different reason for why this is. And I think for some families it's just they needed more time. And so this was for them a call that was at 04:00 a.m. and they were at home and they weren't with her. And many families just want to be there for the end. I think for some families there's a bit of denial, “Okay, sure theoretically she said do not resuscitate, do not intubate, but we're not at that point yet.” So I think for some families there's that. And for some families, it just takes more time than they're expecting. And that's not unusual in our world, as I think everyone there saw what was happening to her and what we had essentially done to her, intubating her and putting her on all the pressors and doing all these things that were somewhat against her wishes at the end of life, so we had done these things to her. And it just took a little bit more time to realize this was not what she would want and also to give them time to be there. But I think every family has a different motivation, and it's hard to say how you would react with that phone call at 02:00 a.m. It's never what you think it would be.

Dr. Lidia Schapira: Yeah, it's the old president's commercial, right? “Who do you want to take this call at 03:00 a.m. when there's an emergency?” But when it's this personal, I can understand it. I wonder if you can tell us a little bit how it struck you when the family sort of very organically again reached the conclusion and her husband articulated, “I know what I need to do.” What did that feel like for you as the critical care doctor who is quickly trying to lead this family to perhaps what you would consider the most dignified or humane, compassionate denouement for them?

Dr. Paul Jansson: I think the first feeling for me was relief and just knowing that the decision that they had made for her was the right decision. And it wasn't a decision that I needed to make and talk them into or negotiate with them. It was the decision that they knew was right. And I think the other thing that stuck with me so much was the love and humor that they displayed in this. And I think many, many families would cry and be sad, but how many families would sit there and make a joke about this strange food combination that she has from college and how she loves to cook from the neighborhood, and all of these just flashes of humanity and humor that I was not expecting from the family. And then in that moment, we went very suddenly from humor to this profound grief and appreciation and reflection on who she was as a woman and her personality and how well that complemented her husband. And it was just this emotional whirlwind where we go from bad news to laughing together to crying together, all in the span of what was probably 10 to 15 minutes. That really stuck with me. 

Dr. Lidia Schapira: Paul, humor me here. I don't often get to interview a critical care doctor, especially on a public medium like a podcast. So speak a little bit to me and through me to our listeners. What can oncologists do to have a good rapport with the critical care docs and nurses who are actually looking after their patients? Sometimes there are all of these moments of anticipated tension, and I wonder if you can just give us a little instruction.

Dr. Paul Jansson: That's a wonderful question. I think honesty and truthfulness is always incredibly important, and taking that relationship that you've built with the family over time and bringing us into that circle of trust and letting us give our perspective. And I am not the oncologist, as I said before, I do not know all of the data and all of these things that is well within your specialty, but I know that the specialty of critical care and what is and isn't achievable, and to have the oncologist team have those developed relationships and ideally some knowledge of what the patient would want and blend that with what I'm able to deliver as an intensivist. I think that the trust together and the working together for what the patient wishes and what we can actually deliver for the patient, that's really what is most meaningful in collaborating with the oncologists. 

Dr. Lidia Schapira: Yeah, I say a little prayer for that. I know that I've walked into an ICU and hoped very much that my colleagues in critical care didn't see me as an oncologist in denial, somebody who wanted to be very much a sort of present for their patient. You probably have some of those stories.

Dr. Paul Jansson: There's an interesting tension. Yeah, I think you exactly pointed that out, that there's this tendency to think that the oncologist is always going to offer yet another round of chemotherapy or some clinical trial that can be offered. And on the intensive care side of the fence, we're sitting and counting on our fingers and sometimes toes, how many organ systems are not working, and how we negotiate that hopefulness and optimism with who is in front of us and what we've been dealing with over the last hours and days and weeks. And I think the tension is probably more theoretical. Every time I talk to the oncologist, they're quite realistic. I think more than perhaps is in my mind. So I think there's more of a theoretical disconnect than there is in real life. 

Dr. Lidia Schapira: Well, I hope our professions can coexist and work collaboratively for the sake of our patients. Talk to me a little bit about how you might use this very intimate story in your teaching, since you're part of a teaching faculty.

Dr. Paul Jansson: Well, shortly after the preprint was posted, I actually received a letter by email from a faculty member at a teaching hospital affiliated with a cancer hospital, saying that he was going to start using this piece in his discussions about how to have goals of care discussions with his oncology fellows. And I think there are two different purposes of the question that I asked: “Tell me about her.” And I think they serve two distinct purposes. And the first is this humanizing and making a human connection that we talked about. It allows you to make some of that connection that you haven't had the ability to do over the last weeks and months and years. You can really see that patient as an individual person. And I think the second role that this question helps with, particularly for the intensivist, is it really helps to expectation set. And so for many people, the answer to this question will be, “Oh, well, she was running a mile a day, and she loved her pottery and she loved whatever it was that is her passion.” And for some people, the answer may be, “Well, she was having a really hard time lately, and she was spending more time in the hospital than out of the hospital.” And so that can also really help from the intensivist side of things with prognosticating and really being realistic about what we can offer at this moment. That's why I really like this question “Tell me about her,” because it really helps with everything all at once. It lets us make that human connection. It lets us gather some of the clinical information that we need, and it reminds us of why we're doing this job in the first place, and that's to take care of the patient. 

Dr. Lidia Schapira: Yeah. My very last question now is this: It occurs to me that you have a lot of these moments, and as you say, you cry, you share in the human aspect of all this. And you're right there, you have a front row seat to this grief and this loss. Do you and your colleagues have any protocol or ritual to help one another and support one another and at least acknowledge the emotional load of your work? 

Dr. Paul Jansson: That's an excellent question. I think from the intensivist side of things, when we have the conversation this way, it's actually a blessing to us. I think there's a lot of moral injury, particularly in critical care, and doing things to the patient that I alluded to before, that the patient wouldn't necessarily want, or unnecessarily prolonging life at the risk of suffering. And I think when patients and families realize that this is not what their loved one would want, I think for many of us, this is a relief, and it's a blessing and an honor to take care of patients at the end of life. When it goes like this, we're actually very happy. It's really a pleasure more than a cross to bear.

Dr. Lidia Schapira: Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts, your humor, your humanism, your incredible common sense, and I'm so glad that the piece just poured out and that you chose to put it in front of an oncology readership. So from our listeners, thank you so much.  

And for those of you who are listening, thank you for listening to JCO's Cancer Stories, the Art of Oncology. Until next time, when we'll find you again. Don't forget to give us a rating or review, and be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. You can find all of the ASCO shows at asco.org/podcasts.

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Guest Bio:

Dr. Paul Jansson is an Emergency and Critical Care Physician at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and a member of the Harvard Medical School faculty in Boston.