One of the greatest acts of love is simply bearing witness to the vicissitudes of ageing
O
f the many patients over age 75 on my medical unit, half are what providers describe as “young old” and the remainder as “old old”. Admittedly, this delineation is somewhat arbitrary and the subsequent assessment provides more nuance, but it helps us triage patient needs.
Before the actual round, my team does a paper round. We run through the bread-and-butter issues of any internal medicine ward: heart failure, bad emphysema, rampant diabetes, cognitive decline, frequent falls, frailty.
Besides the medical details, we scrutinise the social circumstances. Does the patient live alone? (about 35% of people over 85 do).
