A couple weeks ago my sister noticed an odd painful bump on the back of her hand and went to the doc to get it checked. Because she has had skin cancer before, they decided to biopsy it.
This afternoon she got an automated email stating that the status of her online medical “chart” had been updated. Her doctor had told her that the results would be in around this time. There was a note on her chart saying (paraphrased), “The tissue analysis of your biopsy of X dated has been completed. Result: squamous cell carcinoma.”
Not one indicator of any human intervention into this notification process. Not one word of context as to what the result meant, or the odds of successful treatment and recovery. Just boilerplate saying the office call her to arrange appropriate followup, and a phone number to call if she had questions. By the end of the work day, no one had called to follow up.
As she was telling me this on the phone, I was looking it up online and was at least able to give her some reassurance, in that this type of cancer is life-threatening in less than 5% of cases. I also told her a joke that fell completely flat. First, I told her that her cancer was kind of the “middle of the road” skin cancer, more dangerous than basal cell carcinoma but less dangerous than melanoma. So if she was the Goldilocks of skin cancer, hers would be “just right”.
Ok, so I have a lousy bedside manner, but Crispy Christ on a Stick, how bad does a result have to be before they will put a human on a phone line to give that kind of news and provide some context and reassurance.
Oh, yes, lest I forget to mention the humane health care practitioner, it is the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics – the area’s premier provider of the robotic approximation of heath “care”.