3:45am March 19, 2014

"Golden Girls" had it right in 1989:

“I don’t know where you doctors lose your humanity, but you lose it. You know, if all of you at the beginning of your careers could get very sick and very scared for a while, you’d probably learn more from that than from anything else. You better start listening to your patients. They need to be heard. They need caring. They need compassion. They need attending to. You know, someday doctor Budd, you’re going to be on the other side of the table, and as angry as I am and as ANGRY as I always will be, I still wish you a better doctor than you were to me.”

- Dorothy Petrillo-Zbornak, regarding a doctor who didn’t take her seriously and was later diagnosed with CFS.

It was based on the experiences of a real person who worked on the show. That’s why they got it so right. Look up on Youtube, or elsewhere, season 5 episode 1 and season 5 episode 2 (“Sick and Tired” part 1 and 2) if you want to see the whole thing.

This is really how I feel about some of the doctors I encountered over the years. Especially now that I know that the biggest problem I had, the one everyone was trying to ignore, was not some vague hard-to-diagnose condition, but a very specific and life-threatening condition diagnosed based on very easy lab tests, and I was afraid to tell anyone how bad it had gotten, partially because I’d run into some really terrible doctors along the way. And if I hadn’t had a really good doctor I don’t know how much longer I’d have lasted.

Notes: