This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is Lee Habib with our American stories.

And once again, we're going to hear from our resident doctor on the show,

Dr. E. Wesley E. Lee, a professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University. And here's Dr. Eelie sharing

his moving story, what I learned from a dying patient.

I had a patient recently whose death was particularly harrowing.

39 years old, PhD, scientist, brilliant.

She was sent to the ICU team as a fascinoma,

meaning a person with a constellation of problems the doctors couldn't figure out.

This woman had been physically fine until two months earlier, and now she was growing progressively

short of breath, had a little blood in her urine, and had pain in her toes, which were turning

blue and red in the cold. Imaging showed that she had a growth on her aortic valve

and that sections of her kidneys were dying.

The doctors at the outside hospital had diagnosed her with blood clots in her lungs

and started her on a blood thinner, but her condition kept worsening.

As the day progressed,

we started all the needed tests and interventions to help sleuth out the problems and fix them.

Hours into my periodic conversations with her and her mother and sister, her mother mentioned

that my patient was agnostic. I realized that up to that point, perhaps because of the sheer rapidity of the way things were unfolding,

I had neglected to take a spiritual history.

Since I teach medical students and residents in physical diagnosis class

about the importance of taking a spiritual history,

...