Living And Dying In Brick City By Sampson Davis

Both living and dying are both parts of life. In the healthcare field, death can not always be prevented. In Living and Dying in Brick City by Sampson Davis, MD, Sampson. Davis takes the reader to a journey that Davis has experienced. In the beginning of this book, Davis explains the background of how he has grown up. Using his sister’s death from AIDS as a drug addict and how his brother is confined to a wheelchair, paralyzed, Sampson Davis does everything he can to help patients with a similar background in the city where he grew up. Even from the start of this book, it is full of events that are very impactful. As one of his patient was a sickle-cell anemia patient, it was Dr. Davis’s first time taking care of one. The thoughts

Once Dr. Davis looked at the chart and realized that the patient came about 15 times the last month and was a frequent flier, many thoughts occurred to him. When he thought to himself, “So now, despite my suspicions, I could not say with 100% certainty that Thomas was faking in order to get the drugs.”, I was surprised and intrigued because that was not the first thing I would think of after finding out that patient was a frequent flier (Davis 27-28). Some questions that he thought was what if the patient was faking his illness to get more drugs? If so, how would it be proved? Because there would be no way to to prove that the patient was in pain or not because pain is not what something others can feel too since one pain for one person can feel almost like nothing while it is the worst pain for someone else. The next question that arose was what if the patient was truly in pain, but the doctors neglected to give him the medication necessary because he was black and seemed like he was a drug addict. If medications were not given to the patient while they were truly in pain, Dr. Davis would have been sued. When Dr. Davis thought these, it completely slipped my mind that patients are able to come to hospitals constantly because of their disorder to get drugs even if they fake the

Davis walked by to check on how the patient and found the patient was sound asleep, but when he was awoken after Dr. Davis bumped into his crutches, the patient looked at the clock and since two hours have passed, he asked “‘Hey doc, glad you’re here. I need more pain medicine.’” (Davis 28) At this point I was convinced that this patient was just asking for more medicine and was just trying to trick the doctor because if someone was sound asleep and then wake up to say they need more medicine, it would sound very suspicious. At this point, when other people say to go with your gut feeling because it is always right, the gut feeling that this patient might just come as a sickle-cell patient just to get drugs was actually true. From this, I am now aware that even some frequent fliers may seem suspicious of just coming to the hospital for