When I was doing my A levels I wanted to be a doctor. I liked science and puzzle solving. I was interested in people and somehow it made sense but I was far too lazy and a bit squeamish, so it never happened. I've visited people in hospital more often than I would like recently and I have never been so grateful for my laziness.
Everything moves so slowly in hospital: a doctor can order a test on Wednesday and it still hasn't happened by Sunday. Patients are annoying and their relatives are worse. Hospitals are huge, easy to get lost in and full of sick people. There's never any space in the car park and parking costs a fortune. Joking is banned in hospital, even though they are weirdly funny places. And the food....the food is.....indescribable.
If you work in hospital the only cure for all of this annoyance is to block it all out. You can stand in the middle of a ward, loudly discussing a patient and his left-sided paralysis without even noticing that he has fallen further onto his left side, almost out of bed. The sound of bleeping machines and their blaring alarms fall on deaf ears. When patients press their call buttons you keep your focus on your screen: chances are they are only going to ask for something that you don't have, like a pillow, or a chair for their visitors to sit on.
I'm not sure I could have been a professional ignorer.
I can see why you would have to, though, to survive. When you have heard a story twenty one times, you do begin to switch off.
"Yeah, mate, it was all very sudden. You know me, I never take a single pill and now I've got hundreds to take every day......I think they're putting bromide in my tea too, cause I can't get it up."
I had to keep listening because I wanted one of his phone-a-friends to ask him why he needed to 'get it up' on an Emergency Assessment Ward. If that was a standard test I became even more grateful I had given up any idea of being a doctor.
I would snub lots of relatives too. Probably not the ones they look right through. I would talk to the smiling ones who make jokes and ask politely for a chair but I would tell those who insist on a nurse sitting with them and feeding their relative (who is perfectly capable of doing it himself) to .... (Alright,I'd probably be sacked). I would tell the relatives that insist that the nurse showers and feed their relative before they'll take him home that they and people like them are solely responsible for the collapse of the NHS and physically escort them down the long corridor to wander aimlessly until they work out where the exit is.
I also have some sympathy for the eye-rolling medics whose patients haven't understood a word they've said. As a musician, I also speak a different language to the general population. I can sympathise with both the medic and the man standing outside the toilet being berated, "You need to do the sample again there was no volume on it. We need to know how much you voided." When you've asked a pupil to play a passage 'piano' eleven times you sometimes forget that they might have forgotten that it means quietly and are not annoying you on purpose. Patients ask their doctors to tell them the same thing over and over again because they haven't understood. I hope that's not the reason doctors ask patients to repeat the story too.
The current crop of professional ignorers that I've been watching are extremely skilled. They can talk to relatives without looking up from a screen, find out everything they need to know about a patient from an i-pad and I am so glad they have the job and not me.
No comments:
Post a Comment