The Right-Wrong Chauvinistic Doctor Can Make Me Disbelieve Everything I Know to be True About My Own Body

Hospitals hurt my heart… and that sounds dramatic but it’s increasingly true.

And it’s not the nurses fault, or the techs, or food workers, or the majority of the people… It’s the fear.

I believe that most nurses can save a patient’s life by fighting for them against unfair odds and placation… but I also believe that the right-wrong chauvinistic doctor can make me disbelieve everything I know to be true about my own body.

I don’t know why patients aren’t given all the information at onset any more (or maybe it’s always been this way?), but portals have now allowed us to see inflamed test results or strange scan reports, and then one lassaiz hospitalist will tell you none of the above. Just to see a specialist.

But I used to trust that I’d be told the things wrong with me so my pain could somehow be validated, at least… my presence less of a matter I feel inclined to excuse… so that I may tell the specialist I inevitably must see. I feel like that is a change that happened somewhere along the way of the last few years I’ve refused to go to ERs or be interned (unless for surgeries. Direct in, direct out. Like a drive thru)… or maybe I’ve just changed instead. Lost belief. Become more cynical.

“Do you want the heparin shot now or do you want to skip it since you’re moving around a lot?” The nurse asked me. A three generation nurse; a family of givers. “I have to recommend it because you’re a heart patient so it’s important but… You always have the choice.”

I almost always have a tele-heart-octopus attached to me because of my heart, and every time (ev-er-ey time), complain out loud - but only to myself- about the fact that they don’t come with clips so that they may be attached to clothing as one would assume. Instead, a person has to juggle the end of the heart monitor, the IV pole, the phone (if you have kids and are worried about missing a text, for example) and one’s sanity to go to the bathroom (which- thanks to fluids- is every 2.5 seconds, rounding down).

“I don’t think anyone has ever said that to me before,” I told the nurse, not caring about the heart part but caring about the her part, “Patients are rarely given choices.”

“You’d be surprised how many people say that,” she said, and the sad thing is…

I wasn’t.

** These thoughts and this footage was a few weeks ago: Not current…. though the feelings still stand **

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