Please share your stories of inappropriate, horrifying, or just plain odd beside manner.
To start:
After many months of treatment my wife was in for major surgery. They knocked her out at nine, the surgeon did his thing, and I waited. Around one he comes to talk to me. The news, it is all good. Did not see anything unexpected, margins looked clear, best case, etc.
I take all of this with a blank face. It is a combination New Englander/emotionally exhausted thing. I’ve just spent the last few hours trying to figure out how to deal with worst case. The doctor, a Californian who is having a good day, seems to think I don’t get what he is saying.
He leans in earnestly. He tells me this is a good thing. Then he unleashes the full on fist pump with knee accompaniment. There was a “Yeah!” in there too. My New England stoicism held out, mightier than the laughter. But only just.
I think it’s more of a case of culture clash (and so do you, based on your OP) than poor bedside manner. From the doctor’s point of view, he’s undoubtedly relieved and happy to be giving you good news instead of the alternative, and needed to let off steam.
My wife was pregnant with our first child. At a routine doctor’s visit, she told our doctor she’d been having some pains in her tailbone whenever she tried to sit down.
“Well yeah,” replied the doctor, absolutely straightfacedly. “That’s because there’s a tumor growing on it.”
Upon witnessing the horrified looks from me and my wife, the doctor clarified, in quick, robotic tones: “I mean the baby. It puts pressure on the lower spine.”
Upon witnessing the horrified further looks from me and my wife, the doctor quickly moved on.
Well, it was a long time ago, but when I was a mere toddler my father was in a near-fatal car accident (a bus forced him off the roadbluntly that he would not last the night. He lived to be 92 years old.
More than ten years ago, I had to have an emergency appendectomy. The hospital I drove myself to didn’t have any room in the regular surgical ward, so they sent me to the day surgery ward with the understanding that if I needed to stay overnight, I could.
Great. Except no one told the day nurse. And while I was completely dopey, trying to wake up, no one sitting with me, because it all started in the middle of a Wednesday, the nurse came in every half an hour to see if I was ready to go yet. It was after 6 p.m., and I was her last patient, and clearly, she couldn’t go home until I left. I felt so cared for.
My friends finally found me and ran interference. One filled prescriptions, including the precious painkillers. A second handled paperwork, and a third pushed the wheelchair. I was never so glad in my life to crawl into my bed at home.
I had a root canal that became infected with an anaerobic bacteria. Because of a series of complicated situations I ended up in the emergency room late at night and was interviewed by an obviously very tired intern.
While I was there I must have also mentioned that I had rescued a “wee slicket beastie” from the cat that day and had been bit in the finger by the little ingrate.
Some time later, in reviewing my medical chart, I saw a note from that intern which read, “She says she has been bit in the mouth by a mouse. But I doubt that.” Good on him!
When I was 8 or so, I stepped on a thorn while running barefoot in a friend’s yard. The thorn broke off and I didn’t realize part was still lodged in my foot. Fast forward a few days and I have a terrible, pus-filled ball on the bottom of my foot, so my mom took me to a walk-in clinic. It was just at closing time, but they saw I was in pain, so the nurse took pity on me and got the doctor, who was pissed at having to see another patient. So he saunters into the room, smoking a cigarette, pokes around at my foot with a needle, gives me a novacaine injection in my foot and begins to dig. And dig. All the while I’m squirming because anesthesia simply doesn’t work well on me. However, he refused to believe me and didn’t want to take the time to give me more, so instead kept slapping the back of my calf while digging in my foot with a scalpel. The thorn was so deep and so infected, he couldn’t find it at first. He looks at my mom and says, “Are you sure there’s really something in there?” Mom says yes, so he sterilizes his pocket knife over his lighter and proceeds to open the hole in the bottom of my foot. Mom said I was making these horrible, animal-like screams deep in my throat while the nurses held my leg down. The guy finally managed to find the now-soggy tip of the thorn, said, “Hey, I guess there was something in there,” bandaged my foot and left. Asshole.
At 12 years old, I was really skinny and very insecure about my weight. I was convinced I was a tub of lard. So I asked my doctor if I was fat. His response was, “Well, I gotta say… Choose either butter or jam on your toast, but not both. That’s how you pack on the pounds.” First, what he said made absolutely no sense whatsoever, yet convinced me that I was beyond fat. Second, I was later treated for anorexia that year.
When I was in labor with my firstborn, I went into the evaluation unit when my contractions had started coming five minutes apart. I was also concerned because I was very swollen and had a terrible headache, so I wanted them to check for pre-eclampsia as well. The doc examined me, gave me some antibiotics and sent me home saying that I wasn’t in labor, I had an infection and I should really not bother to go in and waste medical professionals’ time until I was 100% sure I was ready to give birth. My son was born about 24 hours later (it was a hell of a long labor and I had eclampsia – ta dah!).
I once had a doctor make a “lighthearted” mildly sexual joke while giving me a gynecological exam. (He was a GP, not a GYN, and we were running through a whole battery of exams that I needed to get into Peace Corps.) I was horrified that he would sexualize a medical procedure like that and my skin crawls just to think of it today, five years later.
My mom just told me one yesterday:
She and dad noticed I was walking with a limp when I was young (4 or 5, maybe), so they took me to a pediatrician. The doctor examined me, said he felt “a little looseness” in my hip, and followed that up with “But that’s not the real problem. You know the real problem here? You’re an old mommy, and you’re worrying too much.”
Mom was 35, if that.
She gently told me to put my shoes on again, and told the doctor, “If you think I’m paying for that diagnosis, you’re crazy.” Told the receptionist the same thing as we walked out. Never received a bill for the visit, either.
I was in the Navy and had only been married about 3 months when my husband yelled at me and made me go see a Gyn because of my erratic and painful periods. So I went. The Dr I saw was quite junior in rank, therefore a fairly new doctor. After the pelvic exam, he told me that I had a tumor the size of a grapefruit on my uterus and it was probably pre-cancerous. He ordered an ultrasound. I cried for days - I was only 31!!
Fortunately, when I went back a week later for the results, a more senior doctor was called in to read the films and very gently informed me that I had an ovarian cyst, not cancer, and that I needed surgery. Further, I never saw the young ass of a doctor again. The older guy did the surgery, being careful to leave me with a working ovary. I know this because 8 months later, I got pregnant. I can only hope the first jerk learned something eventually.
Don’t count on it. Doctors, especially in peacetime, typically have less accountability than any other military personnel. My mom was in about 1960 and was given some diagnosis or another. It was only through the intervention of a CPO, who had overheard, that she learned the guy was an eye doctor, way out of his training, and that she should seek a second opinion.
My DD was born after 36 hours of back labour. She was 23 3/4 inches long and presenting OP - no wonder she was stuck.
Anyway they prepped me and wheeled me in for a C-section. By this point my epidural kept wearing off, and they kept topping me up. By the time I was on the table for the procedure, I had feeling on my right side.
As soon as they started cutting, I said, “I can feel that cutting.”
The anesthesiologist said, “What?” very angrily.
I repeated that I could feel it, the cutting.
He let out this long-suffering sigh and said to the other (male) doctor across the room with a snotty tone, “Low pain tolerance.”
excuse me?
Not a doctor, but back in college, my roommate, his girlfriend, and I were all taking an art class. On a field trip to a museum, the girlfriend fainted for some low blood sugar reason. The professor leaned into me and asked, with a thick Belgian accent, “Izz zshe dizzEAZED?”
During the birth of my first child, I was finally in the pushing stage after 36 hours of non-medicated labor. I was exhausted and scared and in pain. While pushing, I grunted/groaned/moaned a bit and my OB slapped his hand over my mouth and told me to “hush”. I tried to bite him.
My neighbor was telling me the other day about his Colonoscopy gone bad. He went in and his doctor was out sick so they had another doctor covering for him. About a minute into the procedure the machine goes Pop and starts smoking. The doctor jumped and almost knocked the nurse over trying to get out of the room. So he is left in the room with a tube up his rear with a smoking machine alone!
He said he unplugged the machine and no one came back in for a few minutes. They said they had to reschedule it because the machine was broken. He left and became ill and went to the ER. It turns out the doctor punctured his colon wall when he jumped so he was in the hospital for a week with the repair! Talk about a crappy deal!
