Patience and patients

So I played this hockey game. And I got this niggle. The “hmm, I’ll stretch again when I get home..” kind of niggle. The “maybe I should have a long bath” kind of niggle. The “perhaps I best skip that run tomorrow” kind of niggle. You know the kind. Nothing major. No stress.

Next day: Yeah, that kind of hurts.

That weekend: All good. Woo! Back to training on Monday morning.

Monday afternoon: Oh WOW. YeahItotallycantwalknow. Sweet.

Cue: Crutches, painkillers and a week of desk work on doctor’s orders.

I cannot stand feeling less than 100%. True, no one likes being on poor form or incapacitated in some way, but waiting for something to heal has to be THE most frustrating thing ever. Possibly more frustrating than getting to work and realizing you’ve left your lunch at home (especially when it’s Thai beef salad). Than hitting every red light when you’re in a rush (why does that always happen to me? Or maybe I’m just always in a rush so the odds are higher.. Hmm.). Than realizing there is no milk left after making a much-needed brew (Friday 4pm desk still full of reports OH LORD REALLY??). All these trivial things - and the list is endless - YEAH, more frustrating than all of them. You feel like a bit of a pansy. Bit of a lemon. Bit of a wuss. You can’t do anything. You’re just a drain on everyone. You just have to sit there and wait. Wait! In pain. With ice. Pain and ice and helplessness and lethargy and how much longer do I have to do this please? And the lesson “rest now to avoid certain aggravation of above injury later” just really does take an awful long time for me to learn.

What injury?

But on Monday afternoon, as I was being wheelchaired out of hospital by my boss and frog-marched (metaphorically, of course, as that would be quite hard to do in a wheelchair) to the nearest ED clinic due to being in an “unacceptable level of pain”, I had my first taste of what it would be like to be one of our patients.

I think about my patients a lot, not just because they are absolutely amazing, that goes without saying really, but because they are the people I spend most of my time with. Monday, though, and then the rest of the week, was really the first time I have ever considered what it must actually be like to be one of them. This was a little tiny niggle in my lower leg that, okay, was actually a torn muscle that swelled my entire calve to my knee and creaked with excess fluid and flared up with pain and swelling again after being used gently for anymore than five or ten minutes. And my week since then has been vastly different.

But what about stroke? What about the people I see every day? Those who can’t move as they did, or at all? Who are still there but can’t talk to their families because they’ve lost language function? Who can’t swallow normal food and are surviving on pureed diet and thickened fluids? Forget a week or two. Some of these people’s lives will never be the same again.

We live life to the full. We walk, we talk, we run, we leap, we laugh, we joke, we jump, we think, we drink, we drive, we play, we say, we breath. With ease. We live.

We only ever notice something was working so incredibly faultlessly, so much like a perfectly-tuned piano, so exactly as it was made to… when something goes wrong. And when we do, wellll, it’s like the world has ended. I cannot even imagine what it must be like to have an event that changes my life permanently. Unless we’ve been through it directly, I suppose we can only imagine.

And so this has of course made me consider how I treat these people. Yep, left MCA infarct. Um hmm. He can’t swallow. Right. Or talk. Yeah. Seen it before. Okay. Oropharyngeal dysphagia. Patient unsafe for oral intake of diet and fluids; at risk of aspiration. Place on puréed diet and moderately thick fluids; review in 2/7. Expressive aphasia; to be formally assessed. Casual. Next. Hold up: this is a patient. A person. Do I ever stop to think how this is actually affecting them? I’m not sure I honestly even know how to do that.. Do I actually acknowledge what it is that has just happened to them? Do I consider how helpless and frustrated and incapacitated they might be feeling? I’d like to think I do, but.. DO I REALLY?

I’m not sure.

I saw 3-minute-long video on a friend’s facebook page a while back. It stopped me in my tracks and has since had an impact on my reaction to several different situations I’ve found myself in. I’ve passed it round my colleagues, I value its message so highly. Sympathy is not always right in these times. How can you sympathise when you’ve never actually been there yourself? Empathy.
http://www.upworthy.com/my-wife-didnt-get-why-i-was-so-into-this-woman-but-after-about-40-seconds-we-were-both-obsessed

I feel awful in a way to have even been grumbling about something so minor. The next time I’m running around the pitch, or training in the Den, or playing football on the beach, or pushing a trolley around a shop, or walking down the road, or eating a normal meal, or sitting at the table, or having a conversation, or typing this, or sleeping well, or breathing unaided, or just being, I hope I remember to appreciate what it is I have that is still, thank goodness,

working.

Take care all.

JP