I keep scaring medical professionals.
Jun. 16th, 2015 08:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snarpSometimes it's obvious why. Like, once I was at a neuro appointment, and I'd been mostly-monosyllabic and acting like I was sleepwalking for the first ten minutes, and the person was acting worried I was under-reacting because I was scared my brain was going to leak out my ears or something.
And in an effort to reassure them I said, "yeah no it's cool I'm totally aware that the current understanding of the etiology of the condition is limited because these things are treated as incidental findings and don't even necessarily get noted on radiology reports and also the research has been mostly on people like twice my age or older."
Oh no! Terrifying! Because they're now digging through everything they've said trying to figure out whether they stuck some imprecise/inaccurate fluffy stuff into their patient-reassurance patter, and what if I call them on it, or mistrust everything else they say on that basis!*
But I don't know why this happened:
me, as nurse is taking my blood pressure: To what extent do you think these results get inflated because people are scared of the blood-pressure cuff? Or just medical environments in general? Someone must have tried to calculate like, a margin or whatever...
nurse, panicking for some reason: I don't know!
Maybe I sounded hostile to the blood-pressure cuff? I'm sorry, neurosurgery nurse, I'd been in the car a long time and my head really hurt.
-
* I don't usually do that unless they've provided evidence that they buy into the fluff. Someone acts like they genuinely think going to the gym is a treatment for menstrual irregularity, or that it's practical to "stop using" the arm with the fucked-up tendon for months at a time, yeah, that person is not doing their job and gets told off.
But someone saying "The brain's really complicated, something happening in the pineal gland might affect the, the spine even, it's all connected, we can't really make judgments on whether Thing A might be causing Result X or not" - that's just kind of singing a lullaby, it's comforting to people on both sides of the interaction, I'm not going to be a dick about it.
And in an effort to reassure them I said, "yeah no it's cool I'm totally aware that the current understanding of the etiology of the condition is limited because these things are treated as incidental findings and don't even necessarily get noted on radiology reports and also the research has been mostly on people like twice my age or older."
Oh no! Terrifying! Because they're now digging through everything they've said trying to figure out whether they stuck some imprecise/inaccurate fluffy stuff into their patient-reassurance patter, and what if I call them on it, or mistrust everything else they say on that basis!*
But I don't know why this happened:
me, as nurse is taking my blood pressure: To what extent do you think these results get inflated because people are scared of the blood-pressure cuff? Or just medical environments in general? Someone must have tried to calculate like, a margin or whatever...
nurse, panicking for some reason: I don't know!
Maybe I sounded hostile to the blood-pressure cuff? I'm sorry, neurosurgery nurse, I'd been in the car a long time and my head really hurt.
-
* I don't usually do that unless they've provided evidence that they buy into the fluff. Someone acts like they genuinely think going to the gym is a treatment for menstrual irregularity, or that it's practical to "stop using" the arm with the fucked-up tendon for months at a time, yeah, that person is not doing their job and gets told off.
But someone saying "The brain's really complicated, something happening in the pineal gland might affect the, the spine even, it's all connected, we can't really make judgments on whether Thing A might be causing Result X or not" - that's just kind of singing a lullaby, it's comforting to people on both sides of the interaction, I'm not going to be a dick about it.
