This week the biggest challenge was being a patient myself. Don’t worry readers (aka mum and dad) I was not injured, but found myself needing to visit the dentist for some work, and visiting occupational health for some blood tests and vaccinations for my elective.<\/p>\n
It’s probably well agreed that the worst possible patient is one who thinks they know lots (courtesy of a search engine), but in fact don’t know much at all. Well, this was me.\u00a0First, at the dentist I was looking at the x-rays and standing up whilst the dentist was talking, until I was sharply asked to sit down by the dental nurse! Similarly at occupational health I had every possible piece of paper with me for my appointment in a folder, and had done all of my research before attending.<\/p>\n
However I started to realise that the reason I appeared as a really irritating patient was that actually I was very nervous about handing the control over to someone else. It’s a very strange position to find yourself in, when you are used to being in control and managing nervous patients, to being one yourself.<\/p>\n
The challenge started with watching the dental nurse and dentist exchange looks over me, hearing the dentist ask for instruments I don’t know the name of and not knowing what on earth was going on in my mouth. I suddenly realised how much of a control freak I am! This prompted a slightly stressful bizarre situation when every time the dentist did something, I asked a question or got more physically nervous, which in turn got him sweating more (he must have thought I was a huge dental critic!) and as a result I found myself getting more nervous!<\/p>\n
Similar events occurred in occupational health, with me feeling too squeemish to watch the vaccinations or my blood test. It’s so strange, I can see operations, autopsies and a range of bodily fluids, or even perform these tests on someone else, but cannot manage to watch my own blood flow out of my arm!<\/p>\n
As I packed away my huge folder of paperwork and put all the vaccination leaflets and handmade notes I’d made into my bag, I realised after being one I now had more respect for the nervous patient than ever before.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In which I am the nightmare patient at both the dentist and also occupational health…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1044,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[185196,1],"tags":[14874,189513],"class_list":["post-1414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-challenge-of-the-week","category-uncategorized","tag-clinical","tag-draining"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1044"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1414"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1414\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}