One dying patient taught me that doing nothing can be brave

“There is something actually, doctor.”

I turned around in relief.

Anxiously twirling my pen, the piece of armoury I still felt most comfortable with as a junior doctor, I hurried back to her bedside, drug chart poised.

Annette was an 82-year-old lady with lung cancer. It was my first month at the hospice. We’d been trying everything to ease her breathlessness. From medications to mindfulness, chest physiotherapy to visits from the chaplain … nothing helped. And now a lump formed in my throat every morning, as I tentatively roused the frail outline curled into a ball, each day bearing a starker resemblance to a child. Her words were interspersed with a soft, gasping rattle, as I’d ask the same question: “What can I do for you Annette?”

I don’t remember learning much about end-of-life care at medical school. Or perhaps I didn’t pay much attention. After all, I went into this job to keep my patients alive. Thinking about death wasn’t a subject that resonated with the newly qualified me, raring to go into action, scenes of bloody heroics reflected in my eyes as I was unleashed onto the wards.

I spent six years being trained how to deploy our ever-expanding arsenal of technology. My satisfaction, and my identity as a doctor, came from a feeling of competence. Just as a sculptor feeds his passion by constructing new statues or a carpenter by chipping away at fragile antiques to restore them to their beauty, so I fed my sense of worth by fixing what was in my control.

I had just about grasped the choreography of medicine: people agree to become our patients and we agree to try and fix them until the very end, as all manner of machinery trill and beep around their frail figures.

But Annette was not being fixed. And I was running out of tools.

“Do you know what I’d really like, doc? Some KFC.”

As I sat with her later, watching her surprisingly nimble arthritic fingers tear apart a bucket of chicken wings, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we’d surrendered. I knew our battle with death can never be won, but I had a niggling unease that we were retreating prematurely.

It soon became a ritual. Every few days I sat with her as she licked her fingertips and painted stories of her childhood. She soon confessed her biggest fear – dying alone at home. She didn’t want us rummaging in our armoury for something else to deflect the grip of death, as it inched closer.

So we listened, and we stopped. A week later, Annette passed away, surrounded by her family. I had never before thought of what a good death should look like. But as I stroked her hair with prickling eyes, I knew that I had just witnessed one.

I began to change my view of end-of-life conversations. I soon saw an irony in them: when it came down to it, done well, they were not about the end at all. They were more about life than any other conversations I had ever had with my patients.

This job has made me contemplate the questions Atul Gawande, a surgeon, writer, and public health researcher, so eloquently asks. Have we built our system around the few patients that exceed survival expectations, at the expense of preparing the rest for a more likely outcome? Through our struggle to curb our medical urges, are we failing to hear what really matters to them at a time when their choices should be most respected? Is there a tendency to preserve every fibre of life, to glorify longevity, over what actually makes our lives worth living?

Our lives are stories, and we want to be the authors. And in stories, the endings count. I’ve learnt that, as doctors, we need to be better at shaping those narratives, at helping patients with their endings.

After six years of medical school, death is a certainty that I must admit I shrank away from. But a picture of Annette and her bucket of KFC is now etched in my memory. I thank her for the lesson she taught me: that sometimes, doing nothing is the bravest decision of all.

If you would like to contribute to our Blood, sweat and tears series which is about memorable moments in a healthcare career, please read our guidelines and get in touch by emailing sarah.johnson@theguardian.com.

Join the Healthcare Professionals Network to read more pieces like this. And follow us on Twitter (@GdnHealthcare) to keep up with the latest healthcare news and views.

One dying patient taught me that doing nothing can be brave