At dinner the other night, I sat next to Dr. Rebecca Brooks, who
is gynecologic oncologist and assistant professor at the
University of California San Francisco.  Dr. Brooks operates on
many patients with advanced cancer.  So one of the questions I
had for her was how she tells people they are going to die.  Dr.
Brooks said she developed her own style of doing this in part by
watching a range of different styles during her residency years.
One of the doctors she worked with, she says, was so dark and
direct about it that he often sounded as though he was going out
of his way to paint the worst-case scenario in the blackest
possible terms--even if the outlook wasn't that bleak.  Being
overly sunny in the face of a bleak prognosis, of course, is
also problematic. And it's dishonest to people who often have
little time left and need to use that time as best they can.
Watching the first doctor, Dr. Brooks says, helped her get
comfortable delivering very bad news--albeit in a less-
apocalyptic package.  Each pati