Social Illness

Endless social problems torment me everyday! i guess now that i'm doing medicine which is supposed to provide a much more wholistic kinda care for patients, social issues of pts form quite a big part of our care.

it's really tiring sometimes... especially the difficult family members. There are those who insist on receiving updates EVERY SINGLE DAY and demand that they're informed whenever ANY procedure is done on their parents (including blood tests). They'll march up to me and ask "so what is happening to my mom today?" and i'm like "same as what i told you yesterday! she'll need 14 days of the antibiotics. After which, if she is well, no fever, she can go home."

Some family consists of 5 or 6 children and each one comes 1 hour apart and requests for an update. Some family blames ppl for everything and threatens with "I will complain!" at the slightest thing.

Haha! i chose this career cos i thought i'll love the human interaction... the human factor in my everyday worklife. so am i eating my words now?? not really actually. i realized with some of these encounters, i emerge a different person in terms of my perception of the world and of myself. so it's pretty enlightening sometimes...

when i see ugliness reflected in a person, cos of the hatred and distaste that i feel, i subconsciously make a mental note never to be like that. sometimes i can't discharge my patients cos their family just can't be contacted - not picking up hp cos they've obviously conveniently abandoned their parent in the hospital. sometimes i interview children who know ZILCH about their parents who have been staying with them and whatever question i asked they said "ask the maid, ask the maid."

there're also siblings who are in conflict with each other and can't come to a decision for their parent's treatment plan. or siblings who push things to one another... saying "no no... i'm not the one to make the decision. ask her, she's the one with all the money!"... and i end up calling a few other siblings who say the same thing. i even heard of children who ran away with the money pooled together by all the siblings for their mom's nursing home fees.

gosh... in the past, i used to comment when i watch tv soap dramas "wah! where got such miserable and sad things in this world?" and my aunt will say "of course! if the tv dramas show that, somewhere in the world it's happening!" now i believe...

the ugliness of the human race... is a social illness i hafta deal with everyday. unfortunately, my medical school didn't quite teach me how to treat it... or is there a way to treat it in the first place?