bittersnurr:

kelpforestdweller:

pervocracy:

I’m starting to appreciate more just how scary it is to be a doctor.

You have a patient come in with a stomach ache, nausea, feels tired and sort of generally miserable, no other obvious characteristic symptoms.

Out of 100 patients like this, 90* will be a minor gastroenteritis or whatever, maybe you ate something bad, here’s some nausea medication, go home and eat bland foods and get enough fluid and sleep it off.

And 7 will be appendicitis or gallstones or pancreatitis and need to be admitted to the hospital, 1 will be a heart attack with atypical symptoms, 1 will be the first sign of cancer, and 1 will be some weirdo disorder with a name like “Coleman’s 4268py deletion snydrome, Type II”** that you never heard of.

If I were a doctor, this would make me terrified to ever tell a patient “maybe you ate something bad, go home and sleep it off.”  Even though that’s usually the right answer, and even though it’s a waste of time and money to do an EKG and CT and 4268py test on everyone with a tummy ache–it’s got to be anxiety-provoking to not be certain that you aren’t missing something.  And at some point you will send someone home only to get a call the next day that they collapsed and now they’re in the ICU (or the morgue).  And it’s got to be really hard to go back to work after that and say “go home and sleep it off” to your next patient, even though that’s still usually the right answer.

I’m understanding more these days how tough it is to live with that kind of risk and responsibility.

*not actual statistics

**not an actual thing

there has to be a better way for them to deal with it than not giving a shit about their patients, which is the approach most who deal with me appear to have taken.

are you saying there isn’t enough training or support or something? actually im saying the latter, come to think of it. if it’s really this stressful for doctors, they need more help coping with that so they can stop ruining our lives.

Yeah something I notice that is infuriating is often patients are expected to preform emotional labor for caretakers. Like it doesn’t matter if it is a doctor or one of the many “kid is killed for being a burdern by overstressed parent” stories, the common trend is that the one most viewed as the “victim” in the circumstances is the care provider not the one relying on the care.

Full offense, if you cannot handle the emotional labor of those things, that is in fact one of the BEST uses of therapy. Meanwhile I am stuck in therapy instead, for ptsd, when I am still in the traumatic enviorment because I have to take on the emotional burden of being told that my existance is harming people. My life is so bad it gives my therapist depression sure wish the doctors went instead of coping by telling themselves they are saving me from myself by leaving me to deteriorate.

You are responsible for your own health. You cannot be telling patients they need to learn more coping skills while saying “it is fine I cannot avoid taking my stress out on other people because my reasons are valid”. Then why the fuck is “doctors refused to even run tests until I was bedridden and now my entire life is ruined” not a valid reason?

I am pretty sure the reason this happens is because doctors want to pretend that “only broken people” with actual dxs need to go to therapy. The ironic thing about problems like this is that if you have the dx already that means you probably already are using coping skills but a person who thinks “I am fine and normal” is not going to examine their behavior at all. Instead everyone acts like it is more efficent to give all the emotional labor to the person who is already sick because they can “handle” it better without considering that the reason for this is that person has already applied every coping skill to their life that they could find but it is nowhere near enough when you are carrying the burdens for everyone around you as well.