Mena Mirhom, MD
September 02, 2021
“But ma’am…if you don’t do this, you’re going to die,” I said in a last moment of desperation. Here I sat in the ICU with a 45-year-old woman with no psychiatric history, who was refusing life-saving surgery for what seemed to be no apparent reason. When all else failed, psychiatry was called. “There’s nothing you can say to convince me. I don’t trust any of you.” The surgical and medical team were at a loss and so was I. After speaking with her husband, he offered a simple but surprisingly effective solution. “Doc…we have to call in the big guns here. I need to call our church. She trusts some of the elder women there and I think they can help.” I was admittedly skeptical. Here was a team of veteran doctors and nurses pleading with this woman to have lifesaving surgery and we got nowhere for days.
Could her faith community be the missing link.
