Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Get well soon
Some lessons I can’t seem to learn, no matter how often life provides me the necessary raw data. I should have figured it out as an eight-year-old, son to a mother with myriad health problems, most of them imaginary.
I can’t make it all better.
Some patients come away from my office happy: the ones with wax impactions or swimmer’s ear, folks with deviated septums, nasal passages full of polyps. Those folks are better for having met me. But the people who need help the most are the ones for whom I’m the most powerless.
Today, I diagnosed a bad chronic illness in a very young patient. (Doctor-patient confidentiality prevents me from giving you the details.) Suffice to say, I know full well what this patient is facing.
What can I do? I can make the diagnosis. I can share what I know about the disease. I can line up the necessary specialist consultations. But I can’t cure my patient — I can’t make it all better. I can’t even take the fear away, because I know a lot about this illness, way too much to allow myself to build false hope.
Ages ago I learned that sometimes, just being there is all I can do, and sometimes, that’s enough. I know this. And yet on a deeper level, every single damned time this comes up, I want to make it all better.
I’ll argue with anyone who says this is a feature of a good doctor. Wanting to solve the unsolvable might make me a fine medical researcher*, but it does nothing to help my patients.
D.
*and we all know how well that turned out.
But you do make it better by just being there. I guess that fact will never penetrate your psyche.
I can see how wanting to cure everybody might not be a good thing for you, personally, but I bet it makes you a better advocate for your patients – if you can’t cure it, I bet you do your damnedest to help them cope as well as possible, to have the best quality of life they can under the circumstances.
Painful though it is, I think it’s better to care too much than not enough.
I agree with you both, but from a purely selfish point of view, the whole thing is annoying. This emotional reaction is like an involuntary reflex I can’t control. Makes me wish I were a better Vulcan.
I agree with the sxKitten, and not just because I’m hoping to get lucky tonight. I want my doctor to care what happens to me, dammit. A doctor that cares is a good doctor.
I thought you didn’t like dispassionate Dr.s? Now you’re wanting to be one…can’t have it both ways. You’re great as you are even if it does give you sadness sometimes.
Only tangentially related, but interesting nonetheless:
http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2007/09/dig_this_brain.html#001696
Creepy.