Topic
6 stories: 2 from doctors, 4 from patients
This collection has the same experience described from both sides — worth reading as a pair.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Four years, three rounds, one phone call each time on a Tuesday morning. What I remember most clearly is not the failures. It is the nurse who told me she was sorry, and meant it, and then said my 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.