Let’s face it. Seeing one patient after another after another, day after day after day, month after month after month, can be grueling, boring, and stressful. Especially in the field of adult primary care medicine, the litany of unresolvable complaints is unending.
At the end of some days, I wonder why my patient satisfaction ratings aren’t negative 50. With every appointment, my patients are losing ground. Why don’t they finally wise up and realize that each time they see me, they move one step closer to the grave? That is why I have taken to calling these encounters “disappointments” — as in, “I’ve got 13 disappointments this morning, but only 12 disappointments in the afternoon.”
Amid the drudgery, though, there are bright spots, little twinkling stars that keep me oriented in time and place and provide occasional glimmers of hope that maybe I am in the right profession. What are these stars, you ask? Small stories patients tell me from their lives, sometimes touching, sometimes, tragic. When I am feeling really bushed and strained to the max, a patient will share a poignant tale that makes my day.
I had one particularly rich week in March when it seemed each and every patient had an unusual story. Here are samples of just a few:
- A 67-year-old man who has lived with his mother his entire life complained to me about her cooking. She is 89 years old.
- A 35-year-old single man came in wearing an incredibly ugly plaid shirt made more remarkable by his even uglier plaid pants. He was bothered by a cotton swab that had broken off in his ear 18 months earlier, and had decided it was now time to have it removed.
- A healthy 91-year-old wanted me to tell her why she was feeling a bit tired.
- A 75-year-old working secretary came in with a horrible cough and a high fever, and adamantly refused my advice to stay off work a few days. She thought I was promoting laziness and sloth.
- A middle-aged man hesitantly acknowledged that he was a prominent character in a nonfiction book. He is a private investigator who helped win freedom for a National Hockey League player convicted of murder in Florida many years ago.
- A 50-year-old woman coming in with a sore throat abruptly broke down and started crying. Her son, a Rhodes scholar and grad student at Columbia, had just been murdered on a field trip to Latin America.
- An 87-year-old man hesitated at the end of his appointment, then asked for Viagra, saying, “I want to surprise the old lady tonight.”
- A health care worker with 12 hours of a runny nose came in demanding antibiotics, saying, “It’s the only thing that works.”
- A nice couple in their 70’s who spend most of the year traveling around the U.S. in their fifth wheel came in to see me for their annual checkups. They reported they had specifically stopped over in my hometown, Topeka, Kansas, since I had told them I was born and raised there. When I asked how it was, they cleared their throats and said they had left after one day “because there doesn’t seem to be much to do there.”
Silver linings appearing during a single work week. These bright spots are not always cheery, but they are invariably distracting.
(April 2001)