I entered the exam room. There, the father and daughter sat silently, facing each other but on opposite ends of the small room. I quickly gleaned that the reason for the visit was a scaly, red, itchy rash. Ninety-five of one hundred times this means eczema. A total no-brainer!!!
Then I examined the detail of the medical history noted in the chart. The daughter (all of thirteen) carried a diagnosis of lupus nephritis (I’ll let someone else explain exactly how serious and unusual this is.). Thankfully, she’s doing well, but she’s on big medications; ones with significant known side-effects as well as unproven safety records when used in this age range. She hardly speaks. Her father does all the talking.
He’s her only care-taker. He’s slightly disheveled. He knows a basic version, with estimated dates, of her entire medical history. She has a lot of “medical history” for a thirteen-year-old.
He asked why my badge shows M.D. and Ph.D. “What didja do, study psychology *and * become a doctor?”
I explained that my Ph.D. was a research degree in immunology. The subject matter was lupus (I’m trying to make up lost ground on the clinical side of lupus but I could bend your ear apiece about research aspects.).
We discuss her initial diagnosis. He says, “She’s had the lupus since she’s eleven.”
“Eleven,” I was a bit startled, I admit, “that’s very young.”
I tried to draw the daughter out a bit. I sensed from their conduct that her disease was seldom discussed in an open manner.
She almost said something but he cut her off.
“They don’t live too long when they get it so young, right?”
Speaking as a doctor and as a parent of a child with Cystic Fibrosis, that caretaker needs remedial education in sensitivity. My first educational tool of choice would be a tire iron.
I’m surprised that the reactions are so unforgivingly hostile to the father. He’s stupid, not cruel. It’s not as though her death, should they in fact be facing it, is something he’s indifferent to. Perhaps in his fearful stupidity, he’s clumsily looking for reassurance that he’s wrong, or a way to cope if he’s right. He’s still being careless and stupid, but last time I checked, most of us were flawed human beings, especially in the face of painful circumstances.
I think a * starting * place is a gentle conversation privately, rather than going straight for the violence.
No, stoid. He’s cruel. He may be cruel out of ignorance. But he may not be. But his remark is quite cruel. Education is indeed needed, along with assessment of the social situation. And I wouldn’t act on my initial desire to use a tire-iron to educate him. And I would bring more productive tools to bear.
But having had to deal with situations of other children and adults telling my daughter that she’ll die young, well. There’s no getting around it. It’s horribly, horribly, horribly cruel to say something like that in the child’s presence. The father may be seeking relief, but the possible damage inflicted in his seeking can be very, very high.
My wife’s had a diagnosis of Systemic Lupus for 17 years now, and been through a couple rounds of Lupus Nephritis. Properly treated, you can have a near-normal life and life span, and the old 6 year expectancy rule is history.
I used to work in a pediatric cardiology office. There was a father we dealt with, who had a son who’d died after a pediatric cardiology procedure done at another hospital, and who was consulting with one of our doctors about the situation. The son’s heart had been brought to our hospital for examination. The father and another son - young, perhaps in the late single digits in age - came to the doctor’s office to talk to him. Coincidentally, this family had lost another child young, from another ailment, and this was the sole remaining child. So those two enter the doctor’s office, and suddenly the father goes off quite unexpectedly, loudly asking the doctor if his son’s heart was in the office, and he didn’t want his (other) son to be in the same room with it, and going on and on about it right in front of the child, even after the stunned doctor assured him that it wasn’t. I suspect that the father’s behavior caused more trauma to his son than if he’d ended up in the same room with a non-descript opaque container that did contain the heart.
I came into this thread thinking that had to be exaggeration or hyperbole. Sure, you probably heard a grossly insensitive remark, but the most insensitive remark, ever? Not likely.
Guess I was wrong, though. That one is definitely in the running. Poor girl.
No. But someone else might, it’s a small world and as he mentioned it’s an unusual diagnosis. But personally I don’t think choosybeggar did anything wrong. I was just curious about the legality of it.
Still I wouldn’t want my doctor to mention my health problems on a message board, no matter how vaguely.
Man, to be 13 year old and hearing your father ask the doctor: “they don’t live too long when they get it so young, right?” I can’t even begin to comprehend. Such unimaginable cruelty.
Not to excuse the man at all, but sometimes, when you’re half sick from worry, afraid, and beyond exhausted, you say stupid things. When my dad was dying from cancer, I was helping take care of him and working, while attending college at the same time (taking 21 units because I wanted him to still be able to see me graduate, which didn’t work). I once mentioned to a friend that I wished he was already dead.
Now, what I meant was that I wished his pain was over and he could be at peace, but I didn’t have enough functioning brain cells at that point to express myself properly. I’m just very glad that if I had to say something so horrible, it wasn’t in front of family, especially my dad.
Ashes, Ashes, I’m very sorry about your father, and welcome to the boards. Nice post.
A friend of mine died of lupus (well, suicide, but that was an overarching factor). I wish you the best in your research, beggar. Poor kid. Poor father.
I think that for this guy, it would be most suitable to prescribe and personally apply (repeatedly) the remedy of a well-placed baseball bat to the cranial area.
There is nothing anywhere near a breach in that scenario. No patient names, no locations. We don’t even know the treating physician’s name. If we assume the poster is in the US, that’s about 250 million people to choose from.
If we physicians were expected to never discuss the sorts of situations and people we encounter, and how we deal with them, we’d go mad.
"He’s her only care-taker. He’s slightly disheveled. He knows a basic version, with estimated dates, of her entire medical history. She has a lot of “medical history” for a thirteen-year-old. "
I don’t know as I would want to kill or maim her only care-taker. I do know that this situation has enough pain involved without inflicting more.
