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by Carolyn Thomas
So I showed up for a scheduled medical test at the hospital the other day. It was one of those particularly distasteful tests that involve a full day’s prep at home choking down a range of hideous chemical cocktails, consumption of which is designed to induce explosive liquid diarrhea that requires staying very, very close to a toilet all day long. The procedure itself on the following morning was right up there on the Creepy Disgusting Embarrassing Cringe Scale of medical experiences.
Hospital procedures like this feel invasive, uncomfortable, distressing, and revoltingly undignified for most patients. All the more reason that medical staff who administer such procedures need to start treating us like we’re more than just the nameless, faceless 10 o’clock patient in Bed 8, what I’ve previously described here as “the obstacle between them and their next coffee break, just a piece of meat on a slab – but worse, an invisible piece of meat.”
Call me crazy, but I might even go so far as to insist that patients deserve to be treated with common courtesy, and let’s start with the simple basics of saying something like:
“Hello. My name is _____ and I’ll be doing your ______ today.”
Consider, for example, the young male who greeted me in the hospital’s Medical Imaging Department.
Well, perhaps “greeted” is not quite the right word. Rather, he walked up to my gurney where I lay dressed only in my drafty hospital gown, my I.V. already poked into place in my right arm. “So you must be Carolyn?” he said aloud, reading from my chart without actually looking up or making any eye contact whatsoever. I replied:
“Yes, I am. And who are YOU?“
He actually seemed surprised that I would have the temerity to engage him like this. Apparently, he must have missed the “Hello. My name is . . .” basic training on his first-day orientation at Medical Imaging.
But since surviving my heart attack three years ago, I have decided to stop meekly tolerating bad manners from health care providers.
My responses now range from simply stopping them in mid-sentence in order to force them to make eye contact or to introduce themselves or to explain an upcoming procedure, to complaining directly to their department heads (as I detailed here in An Open Letter To All Hospital Staff).
My first basic rule of interpersonal health care communication: do not under any circumstances let a man who hasn’t bothered with the simple human courtesy of introducing himself to you start sticking objects up your bum.
Read the rest of this Heart Sisters article.
