The Seven Minutes I Did Not Have
I used to think the pressure of a busy clinic was a scheduling problem. Then a patient waited until I had my hand on the door handle to ask the only question she had come to ask.
Topic
Empathy
10 stories: 6 from doctors, 4 from patients
This collection has the same experience described from both sides — worth reading as a pair.
Nobody Told Me I Would Have to Grieve Something I Chose
I said yes to the mastectomy in about four seconds. It was the obvious decision and I have never regretted it. What nobody prepared me for was missing something I had actively asked them to take.
I Opened the Artery and Missed the Man
Door to balloon, fifty-one minutes. A textbook result and I was pleased with it. Then he came back to clinic six weeks later, physically well and quietly falling apart, and I realised I had treated an artery and discharged a person.
The Mother Who Slept in the Car Park
We were managing her daughter beautifully. It took eleven days for anyone to work out that she had not been home in that time, and that the person we were about to discharge a baby to was closer to collapse than the baby was.
Ninety-One Days of Somebody Else's Hands
She was born at twenty-nine weeks and for three months other people knew how to look after her and I did not. The kindest thing anyone did was to teach me one small job that was only mine.
Thursdays Belong to the Machine
His bloods were excellent. His fluid balance was textbook. He was also about to lose the job he had held for nineteen years, and I had never once asked him what our schedule was doing to his week.
I Am Not Non-Compliant. I Am Tired.
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.
The Diabetes Is Not the Hard Part
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.
He Said He Was Fine, and I Wrote It Down
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.
Learning to Say His Wife's Name
Our goal was independent transfers and modified diet. His goal was to say her name. It took us five weeks to find that out, and it was the only thing that made him work.