Topic
4 stories: 1 from a doctor, 3 from patients
This collection has the same experience described from both sides — worth reading as a pair.
Everyone kept telling me how lucky I had been and how well it had gone. They were right. I still spent a month and a half convinced that every heartbeat I could feel was the beginning of the end.
It is in my notes, I have seen it: "poorly compliant with fluid restriction". Four years of doing something impossibly hard imperfectly, summarised as a character flaw. Here is what that word does.
Seventeen years, four consultants, roughly forty thousand injections. The insulin I can do in my sleep. What I have never got used to is being spoken to as though my blood sugar is a report card on my character.
The note read: "denies low mood, no active plans, appropriate to discharge from our care." Every word of that was accurate. I had asked closed questions in a shared bay for eleven minutes and recorded the answers as a finding.