The good Doctor

I can hardly recognise myself. When I wanted to be a doctor I had tall dreams of being a very compassionate individual who did not yell or get frustrated with patients. One who took time to listen, empathise, understand......you can fill in the gaps.

These days more often than not I dont slow down to listen, empathise or even understand them. Okay I'm exaggerating. Lets say I prefrentially discriminate. Patients who smile at me when they walk into my office greeting me first are more likely to leave my office feeling they have met a good doctor than those who barge in demanding to see a doctor, and even after I tell them I'm one they look over my head to see if there is anyone hiding behind me. Next they demand for drugs to aid in the healing of their wounds (pls tell me you know of one such drug) and when I explain that no such drug exists they look around even more as if to justify their previous thoughts that this small toad cant be a doctor.

Forgive my rantings but why is it so hard for people up here to accept that a woman can be a doctor. It completely baffles me. My colleague who Im presently working with on the ward bursts into laughter time and time again when the patients call me nurse and I answer. Like I tell him it gets tiring trying to correct them so now I flow with the show!

Dont mind me o! I had one patient yesterday who made me shout at him, or I allowed myself to shout at him puncturing my image of a wonderful doctor. I have been praying that he is not one of these 'bad boys' who will waylay me on my my home:) I know Im also becoming paranoid:)

Comments

  1. CD6:34 PM

    Ah, Tomi! I feel your pain. I was a doctor once (very briefly and many years ago) and faced similar problems. Admittedly, I was less concerned with actually being a Good Doctor than with giving that impression. I did not then (and do not now) have a deep well of emotional resources from which to draw and if I succeeded in empathising with one individual then I had exceeded my monthly quota of emotional involvement. My patients generally had to make do with feigned expressions of interest - the sympathetic nod and the expressive empathetic hum, stock tools which I deployed so effectively that those poor individuals generally left with the impression that I cared, that their petty afflictions and maladies were somehow of interest to me.

    And don't be too hard on those patients who assume that the young lady dressed in white is a nurse. It might seem insulting (after all the training and hard work) but it's based on conditional probabilities. Nine times out of ten (precise probabilities depend on location) they happen to be right. I had a doctor friend who while he worked at a teaching hospital was consistently misidentified as a medical student because he was slight, hairless and fresh-faced. He looked so youthful that one could in all honesty imagine that he had just been detached from his mother's teat. Conditional probabilities sometimes work against us but you are still who you are and you still do what you do. A few marginally sexist and visually impaired patients can never change that.

    ReplyDelete
  2. olaoluwatomi1:09 PM

    thanks for your comments and reminding me that no one can change who i am! Hope you like what you do now better than when you were a doctor, or find it more fulfilling! cheers

    ReplyDelete
  3. SPEECHgirl1:27 PM

    i love doctors and nurses
    i think you people shd be respected and almost revered cos you work magic

    No mind me
    im just in love with what God does thru medicine!

    ReplyDelete
  4. olaoluwatomi8:14 AM

    thanks tosyn!

    ReplyDelete

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