This blog post was originally published on July 16, 2020.
I read something today that, wow it made me mad. It was about a man who had gone in for training for a second joint replacement and was repeatedly passive-aggressively belittled by the instructor because he didn’t fit her preconceived notions of what a joint replacement patient should look like. (He was much younger than the others.) Though the article was entitled, My Loneliest Moment as a Young Person With Chronic Illness, the patient and author of the piece said that 10 years later, he saw the humor and ridiculousness of the situation. I don’t know whether the initial situation or the subsequent dismissal of his own feelings made me angrier.
Let’s address the initial situation first. The patient looked too young to have the condition he had/ treatment he needed. I have had central cataracts since I was 16 due to needing high doses of steroids to treat my meningitis when I was 6. While my ophthalmologist says they grow about as fast as sand moves, eventually sand does move, and for the last 15 years or so, he has been encouraging me to have surgery. The first time I went to see the surgeon he recommended I was still in my 20s. There was no one in that waiting room under the age of 60. You know what I got from the doctor’s staff? A truly sympathetic “you’re too young to have to deal with this”. Want to know what I got from the doctor? An offer of 50% off her services because she felt bad that I was so young and in her office.
That’s not to say all my interactions with medical professionals have been empathetic. Once, when I was in the hospital in my teens, I had an impatient phlebotomist. I was a screamer until I was about 17 when having my blood drawn, and this hospitalization was right in that period. As the person who took me for blood tests, my mom knew how I felt. When the phlebotomist came in to insert an IV, which was worse than a simple blood test, I asked them to please hurry. This person then proceeded to rail at me for “telling them how to do their job.”
Well, my mom was having none of that. It was obvious I was scared, and I hadn’t been rude, just asked them to basically minimize my pain and anxiety as much as they could. After it was done, she went down to have a few words with the hospital ombudsman, and I didn’t see that phlebotomist on rotation for the rest of the week I was there, which was a relief.
The patient in the article did not feel comfortable speaking up or calling out the instructor on her poor behavior, and he shouldn’t have had to. In the first incident, she makes a statement that the table the patient was sitting at was only for patients, and that the families should sit in chairs along the walls. When the patient didn’t move, that should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t. The instructor had preconceived notions of how a particular type of patient should look, and when this patient didn’t fit what she thought he should be, she proceeded to harass him with hostile looks and pointed comments for the length of a training session he needed for his second joint replacement.
This incident was so painful to the patient that he refers to it as his loneliest moment as a young person with chronic illness. Think about that. For most of us, that moment comes when we are in the depths of a downswing, feeling like there is no one out there who knows what we are going through and no one who can help us. But this man’s loneliest moment came in a room full of people who knew exactly what he was going through at the hands of one of those people who was supposed to be helping.
It’s not right. I hope, reader, that if you ever find yourself in a position like this, that you will not let it pass without appropriate action. You can call the person out on their behavior right then, you can wait and let the office who sent you to the person who abused you know (yes, this is abuse), you can call the company responsible for the training and report them, and in this day and age, you can report it on Yelp.
I know it’s hard to speak up, but none of us deserves to be treated as lesser because someone in a treatment role doesn’t know everything. And if you don’t want to rock the boat, think about if it was your mother, father, sister, son, friend. Would you accept that behavior if it was directed toward them? If the answer is no, then why is it acceptable when it is directed toward you?
It’s not.
In a situation like this we must speak up, if not for ourselves, then for the next person who will be the target of the person’s abuse.
This is already a long post, so I will wait to talk about the second half of what made me so angry – minimization through passing off an emotional hit as “humorous” or “ridiculous” – next week.