Today at work, a lady came in for her OB Ultrasound. Nothing out of the ordinary at all, considering I work at a Medical Imaging facility where most patients are women getting either a Mammogram or Ultrasound. However, this one was different.
First thing I noticed was the lady that walked in with the patient was a familiar face, and I realized who she was as she walked through the door. She taught the monthly CPR class held in our conference room for all the Doctor's and Technologists who need to renew their CPR certification every two years. And since I used to work nights, I saw her once a month for two years (Since I'm really bad with names, and shouldn't be saying who these people are anyway, I'll just call her Beth).
I'm not sure where else she works, but it wasn't unusual to see her come in with another patient, either going as an assistant from a doctors office, or some other place. She was with the patient because seventeen weeks into her pregnancy, the patient started having contractions, and her Doctor sent her over right away to get an Ultrasound to see what was going on.
We realized that she needed to be seen right away, and did our part at the front desk and processed her paperwork right away, and one of us walked her upstairs to Ultrasound so she could get seen as soon as possible. Right when my coworker was about to take her up, Beth asked the patient if she wanted her to go with her or wait out in the lobby, and the patient said that she wanted her to go, and in a way that said she needed her to be with her.
They all went upstairs, and about fifteen minutes later we heard an overhead page I hadn't heard in the two and a half years since I started working there.
Being in outpatient radiology (where we are not physically connected to a hospital) we don't really have too hectic of a work environment. Don't get me wrong, there are days when we have more patients then chairs, and babies are crying creating a tense atmosphere where everyone, both workers and patients, with they were someplace else. But it is nowhere near the craziness of a hospital where people coming in have a good chance of being admitted, or are already admitted and have to he handled with care due to their bad immune system or contagious disease they are stuck in the hospital for. When people here use the overhead to page someone, the voice is usually a calm voice trying to connect two people: "Doctor Jones, please call 67655"; "Mammography please call 64092"; "Sam, please call 63117"; something along those lines. However, this voice wasn't calm, and they weren't asking someone to pick up a phone.
"We need a nurse to Ultrasound second floor Stat! Any nurse to Ultrasound second floor stat!"
To the patients in the waiting room, this must have seemed like a normal call, but to everyone working, this wasn't normal.
"That's not good," I said out loud to my coworkers, stating the obvious.
"It must be for that Ultrasound that just went up there," one of my coworkers said back, and my jaw drop. We all knew right then what was going on.
Eventually we found out that once the patient got to the exam room, instead of starting her ultrasound, she started losing her baby. An ambulance was called, one of our radiologists went to the patient, Beth didn’t leave her side, and they all tried to help the patient, even though everyone knew there wasn't much that could be done. The patient was eventually taken out on a stretcher, and EMT took her to the hospital, where her husband and other family members met her, and she did end up miscarrying.
The hardest thing I've found while working in Medical is forgetting that it's people we are working with. A patient will come in, and his name isn't "Frank" or "Bill", he's the "3:00 in MR1" or the "Knee x-ray." When working in medical, it becomes easy to distance yourself from a patient. Everyday someone comes in who is receiving their yearly Mammogram for one breast because cancer had caused one to be removed, or kid comes in with a broken arm that means he won't be playing sports this year for their school. Sad things happen every day, and if I let every single moment get to me, I think I would have quit my job after a month.
One day, a man came in and, while trying to hold back tears, needed to have a copy of the images from a CT scan, because he just came from his doctors office, where he was just told that he had Prostate Cancer and they needed all the medical imaging he's had done recently. I'm standing there, realizing this is probably the first time this guy is saying it out loud, and it is slowly sinking into his mind that the clock he thought was slowly counting down to his death just sped up, and how is he going to tell his family, or friends, and I froze. I didn't know what to do or what to say. Do I say Sorry? Do I try to comfort him? What would I say anyway? What COULD I say?
After he left, I had to step outside for a bit. I couldn't be around anyone else. Of course this didn't happen to me, but it was still tearing me up. It might be easy to separate yourself from a patient, but it's just as easy (if not easier) to feel overcome by someone's situation. So, we separate ourselves from others to keep from getting hurt. But then you forget that these are people, and then you get stuck in this vicious circle of feeling bad because you don't care, and then feeling bad because you care too much.
This isn't just limited to the medical field. We tend to make people into objects or obstacles that either need to be conquered or overcome. I know when I'm driving, if I get cut off, I tend to get mad at the car, and want to pass the person up, or at least arrive at the light at the same time to show the offender that they saved no time cutting me off because we both arrived at the stoplight, so all he did was waste gas for no reason. Even when I'm walking, I'll be upset about someone taking their time slowly walking in front of me, and I get around them, making sure they know that I think they are slow and that they have caused me a moment of inconvenience and need to think of others, right before I realized I probably need to slow down and breathe every once and a while.
Other people are human.
1-They feel.
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