WHEN I saw my first red blanket as a young medical student, I thought little of it.
One
morning, as I rushed around a hospital in California on my daily
rounds, I spotted an old man who lay in bed beneath a scarlet cover, a
sharp contrast to the white linens wrapped around the other patients. He
looked unremarkable, and I assumed he brought the blanket from home. So
I moved on. He wasn’t my patient, anyway.
That
afternoon, I overheard a discussion about the patient between two
physicians. Instead of identifying him in the usual manner — age,
gender, medical problems — one of the doctors said, “This is a red
blanket patient.”
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