by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
For weeks following hospital discharge after my “widow maker” heart attack, I kept forcing a “Fine, just fine!” smile when around others each day, desperately trying to make sense out of a cardiac diagnosis so shocking that it made no sense to me. What I later learned was that sense-making turns out to be a remarkably common early response to a serious medical crisis. Continue reading ““What? So what? Now what?” Self-reflection for the new heart patient”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
Many of my Heart Sisters readers have told me over the years that they can precisely recall, word for word and even decades later, how doctors delivered bad news about a medical crisis. And these bad news conversations are recognized by medical researchers as “distressing and highly emotive tasks” for our physicians, too.(1) Continue reading “Doing a good job when breaking bad news to patients”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
I watched a man recently telling the story of how he’d been “fired” by his cardiologist. All he had done to deserve this, he explained, was to use the f-word during a confrontation with the office receptionist. He complained that he’d been subsequently fired after this receptionist reported his outburst to her boss. He specifically blamed the terms of a recently implemented anti-bullying policy at the medical facility. Because of this stupid receptionist and this anti-bullying policy, he was now stuck in the unenviable state of being without a cardiologist.
No. No. And NO! It was his own decision to behave badly that accomplished that result for him. Not surprisingly, physicians, nurses, and other healthcare staff are fed up with bullies like That Guy, who act as if being a patient means you get a free pass to be a jerk.
It does not mean that at all – and I don’t care how sick you are. Continue reading “Being sick doesn’t excuse being a jerk”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
So I showed up for a scheduled medical test at the hospital the other day. It was one of those particularly distasteful tests that involve a full day’s prep at home choking down a range of hideous chemical cocktails, consumption of which is designed to induce explosive liquid diarrhea that requires staying very, very close to a toilet all day long. The procedure itself on the following morning was right up there on the Creepy Disgusting Embarrassing Cringe Scale of medical experiences.
Hospital procedures like this feel invasive, uncomfortable, distressing, and revoltingly undignified for most patients. All the more reason that medical staff who administer such procedures need to start treating us like we’re more than just the nameless, faceless 10 o’clock patient in Bed 8, what I’ve previously described here as “the obstacle between them and their next coffee break, just a piece of meat on a slab – but worse, an invisible piece of meat.”
Call me crazy, but I might even go so far as to insist that patients deserve to be treated with common courtesy, and let’s start with the simple basics of saying something like:
“Hello. My name is _____ and I’ll be doing your ______ today.” Continue reading “The lost art of common courtesy in medicine”
Heart Sisters 