Lee, a primary care doctor at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, was scheduled to see the patient in three days.
"I was horrified," he says. The patient had been in his 80s, and his wife had died a few months before. "And everyone in medicine knows that when someone dies, there's an increase in risk of death for their spouse over the next six months."
He wanted to know what had happened, but he couldn't find anything in the medical records or in a Web search. "I just felt really guilty that I had not pushed harder to get him in sooner," says Lee. When he couldn't find out anything, he decided to phone the man's house to offer condolences — maybe even to apologize.
"So I called, and to my shock he answered," says Lee. It was the patient, a retired professor living in Boston.
