When you get sick, you can either invoke the martyr pose and take a steady dose of denial, or you can seek the help of a medical professional. What we take for granted as real people is the health of our health professionals.
Believe it or not, your doctor, physio, dentist or nurse can and will suffer illness. It's probably just when we consult with them, it's all about us. You have probably never considered their health far beyond the convention of "how are you?". University of Sydney's Narelle Shadbolt puts it well: "doctors are people and therefore just as likely as anyone to suffer from medical problems", but this is true of any health professional.
I found myself at the business end of the endoscope a couple of years ago. I had been under a great deal of emotional turmoil for a few years, but after another storm weathered, I didn't quite bounce back and a remnant of abdominal pain remained for months unrelenting. After exhausting the self management attempts, I was referred for a gastroscopy. Sometimes a little knowledge can be unhelpful. I was always interested in science and the human body and so when you know too many things that can go wrong, it seems easy to choose the worst case scenario for yourself. I worried about ulcers and I worried about cancer.
Refreshingly the staff at Wanganui Hospital were considerate, compassionate and professional. I was put in the waiting area and twiddled my thumbs. A patient of mine rolled past in a handsome gown and in the most relieved fashion remarked that the scope had just illuminated his back passage. I correctly deduced that he wasn't speaking of his hallway at home, but my most pressing thought was, what if the back passage scope just gets a wipe-down and then goes down my throat? Hanging on to any semblance of power and control I shunned the sedation. Bad move. I also thought how useful that BA paper in sword swallowing at Massey would have been. The worst of it was the progressing of the scope down the oesophagus or "food pipe" as written in the lay language on the information pamphlet. It looked like a bendy piece of reinforcing steel, wrapped in aesthetically pleasing black insulation tape, as if MacGyver had made it. The MacGyver theme did not distract me at all. Gagging for what seemed like 10 mins, eyes bulging and watering simultaneously, the nurse sensitively stroked my arm and whispered calming words. This is the place for such caring. This is a tribute to our nursing profession. Genuine compassionate people in the most appropriate vocation.
I was convinced of the worst, and the pain seemed good enough to be a grumbling ulcer or something more sinister. To my astonishment and great relief, the doctor pronounced a clean bill of health. From somewhere about that time, the pain went away. This is once again evidence for the brain's role in providing a protective painful effect, and when satisfied it was no longer under threat, it stopped the pain. I fuelled it with the worrying after the initial stressful moment, and it stayed. Now please do not mistake this as a piece on internal medicine as I am not speaking about this at all, but rather something I speak about often, which is that pain occurs as a result of your perception of threat to your tissues. It is this change in threat that causes the change in a pain state. For me that was the surgeon, someone whose opinion I am likely to hold in high esteem, saying "you're all right kid".
