Maybe Its Not Them, Maybe Its Me

Okay, self-reflection time.

One of my doctor pals was telling me about a USA Today article he was reading about "difficult patients". He said that the longer a provider was in practice, the fewer difficult patients they thought they had. The article also said that female providers felt they had more difficult patients.

Then he said that its likely that difficult patients are attracted to females because they are more likely to listen and try harder to "fix" them. And of course, the patients love them for it.

If you add a nursing background to the female part, its probably even worse. Nurses are taught to be tolerant and to a certain extent, sacrificial, as part of their professional training. I think that is at the core of why I've been feeling frustrated lately.

I'm being manipulated and taken advantage of by a just a few patients. But my feelings about that and them overshadow all the pleasure I get from all the other patient interactions. For example, a patient on Thursday (at 4:10 PM) said he needed a letter for his FAA physical and it needed to be ready when he came in for his labs at 8AM Monday.

I told him that dictation would not be back by then. If I had cajones I would have left it at that, but noooooo. I said that if it wasn't back by Friday I would type it up myself. By Friday afternoon, I was so busy that I wasn't able to get to it. I was toast and just not able to face staying even later to get his letter done. So tomorrow, I'm going in on my day off to get the letter done. To top it off, I'm not getting paid for any of it.

Who fault is this problem. MINE!!!! Geez, I've really got to get a spine. How hard would it have been to say, "I'm sorry, I just won't be able to accomodate you with so little notice."

I have a few others like him, who are always pushing me to do things for them that require extra work or are against my better judgement....like the lady who demanded the MRI in the previous post. Or the patient who wants a refill on their pain med before it is due...

If I'm going to survive in this role, I've got to grow a spine.

At lunch today, the new nurse practitioner and I were discussing these things and she is struggling with the same issues. The docs we work with are supportive and they do seem to understand how hard it is for us. My husband pointed out that it is ironic though, because as nurses, doctors were the people we had to put up with and couldn't say no to.! Perhaps I'll ask them to pay for a few hours of counseling for us to teach us how to say no without feeling bad about it or angry because we didn't say no.