The Doctor Will See You Now

I do try to think about what it might be like for my patients, waiting in the waiting room to see me, coming in to sit down and tell me what's bothering them, hoping that I will tell them what they want to hear.
I try to judge how nervous or stressed they are, and reassure them by taking my time, letting them speak for as long as they need to, asking "how do you feel in yourself?" rather than "are you barking mad?"
I like to think I am aware of their needs and hopes and fears.

A GP visit is probably relatively low on the Doctor's Appointment Scary Scale though. Lots of my patients wait a long time to get seen by Specialists (you know, those doctors who are so clever they only had to learn one subject, not like the dumbass GPs who have to learn them all). The patient comes to me with their pain or bleeding or lump or uncontrollable tears and I do my best to fix them, but sometimes* I need to send them on to the Higher Beings. I write the letter, or (fancy) do the online referral, and think no more about it. My work there is done.

But the patient leaves me, not with a sense of relief, but with a renewed and heightened anxiety. 
"God I must be fecked, she's sending me to the Top Man."
"I'll be waiting forever and I'll die while watching the letterbox."
"I won't get better until I'm seen by the consultant." (And the corollary to that - "once I see him, I'll be sorted").

None of this dawned on me until I had to, finally, wait a teeny bit longer than I had anticipated to see my surgeon about my Next Step. So instead of the usual thing where I get an appointment before the secretary has had a chance to even type the letter, because my consultants have gone to such lengths to accommodate me over the past 16 months, my surgeon had to postpone me for a week (entirely understandably, as there had been a family bereavement). 
So I entered the realm of those hundreds of patients of mine who are crawling through the hours and minutes, counting down the seconds to the glorious moment when they will be sat in the creaky chair in the Specialist's room, leaning forward and clenching their hands, desperately waiting to hear what he has to say. 

There was going to be a smooth transfer of care of my children to their father so I could get to my appointment. He would come home from work, say hello and kiss us all, I would say goodbye and kiss them all, and head off with plenty of time to get a good parking space and have a few minutes of reading the high-quality magazines in the nice bright waiting room. 

Instead his phone rang as he came in the door. "Yes, that's me. Yes Guard I am his son. A spare key? You can hear him calling from inside the house? Is he okay?" I stopped with the keys in my hand, mouthing "do you need me to stay?", knowing that I would miss my slot with my life-saver/liver-saver.

He shooed me out the door. I got to text him from the nice bright waiting room. "Is your dad okay?" "Don't know, the ambulance is on its way."

Shaking (carefully) the hand that will be cutting into my belly. Offering condolences. Listening as carefully as I can. Trying to file away some of the words I'm not familiar with.
Hemihepatectomy. Electroporation. Mercedes-Benz incision (little joke there about my old Fiesta). Second opinion. Think about it and get back to me. 

Forty minutes and not a stone unturned. But I retain about 20% of it. I am able to transmit about half of that when I get home to dinner and bath and It's My Turn To Pick The Story. 

We recruit a babysitter and go the hospital to find out what's happening with my father-in-law.




I will try to think about all of this the next time I call a patient in from the waiting room.









*5% of the time, in fact. The other 95 patients out of a hundred I manage to sort out myself.