I need to start blogging again if I am going to survive this career. One of the reasons it has been hard to continue blogging is most of the things I want to blog about are work related and given HIPAA laws, I decided the safest thing to do is not blog about work at all.
I've always been able to handle eccentricities of people. You take it for what is it and work with it. Lately, I have been struggling a lot with certain patients types.. I had to make an urgent appointment with my therapist in December because there was a day that I wanted to pack my things and leave clinic in the middle of the day. I was done!
There are certain patients that just suck you dry and they are relentless. What is bad is that there is usually nothing major going on with them..but they take up so much time and space with visits and calls and messages, you don't even have time for the people who are really sick.
What prompted this post was after bending over backwards... a patient looked me in the eye and said no one wants to listen to me they just want to blame everything on my anxiety. "I was like, I don't see how you can say that to me because I have listened to you and never brushed you off. I have ordered studies and tests that I was certain were going to be normal just to provide reassurance. Some of these tests we have repeated multiple times, once again so you are reassured. Not one has been abnormal.
I brought up anxiety only after we had done an extensive workup which was normal, and what I said was your anxiety is not helping. I did not say your anxiety is the course of your symptoms but it is not helping." What I really wanted to say was "are you for real? Did you really fix your mouth to say that to me" if their spouse wasn't there... I probably would have.
It is so frustrating to deal with people like that. I've been on the phone at 10 pm talking to this patient for 30 mins instead of going home to my child. I have seen this patient 5 times in 2 weeks at one point. This is month 3 of this and they calmly says nobody wants to listen to them and want to blame their anxiety.
I can't tell you how many patients show up saying nobody wants to listen to them. I always believe what they tell me because it's their experience but lord Jesus... some of them are blood sucking vampires.
I give up.
