The Better Business Book: 100 People, 100 Stories, 100 Business Lessons To Live By (The 100 Person Book Series 2) by Authors Unite & Tyler Wagner & Patricia Wilson & Wendy Barba & George Mocharko

Author:Authors Unite & Tyler Wagner & Patricia Wilson & Wendy Barba & George Mocharko [Unite, Authors]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Authorsunite.net
Published: 2017-05-19T20:00:00+00:00

Always Give Them Hope

AMANDA FLEISCHUT

Imagine this. You have been suffering from lower back pain for months; in reality it’s actually been years. You have pain radiating from your lower back down the back of your leg to the foot. It used to be an intermittent pain, a nuisance more than anything. You could live with it. However, all those long hours you’ve put in at work are starting to make this pain constant. You work a labor intense job coming up on your 20th anniversary. Long hours coupled with sitting for over half the day doesn’t help one bit, the other half of the day is spent lifting heavy material and boxes. And yes, this work is more intense then all of your training and double-sessions during your high school soccer days. You finally muster up the nerve to ignore your inner “Suck it up” attitude and finally go to your doctor for some help.

To make a long story short, it takes you three months of doctor visits, physical therapy, and fighting with your insurance company for a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to finally get in with an Orthopedic Spine specialist. You had been seeing their Physician Assistant (PA) who has been taking you through all conservative treatment options prior to you having to see the surgeon for a possible surgical recommendation. So here you are, the patient, just having gone through three painful months of physical therapy and all types of medication with no pain relief in sight. The Physician Assistant offered you the idea of epidural steroid injections into your back but after finding out they were long needles that were going into your back you decided to decline that offer for now, due to your fear of needles. The spine surgeon comes in, looks at your MRI only to explain to you in detail that surgery is not going to help relieve your pain. “There is nothing surgically that can be done for you.”

And before you can blink, the surgeon has left the room. You’re left sitting in the office feeling alone, hopeless and aggravated with the waste of the past five hours, the half day of work you again couldn’t afford to take off, the hour of pain it took you to drive to the office, two hours in the waiting room and another hour just to be seen and told “there is nothing surgical that can be done for you.” Most of all you feel hopeless - if not surgery, then what?

I am a Physician Assistant and I’ve observed dozens, if not hundreds, of situations like the one I just described. The doctor gives the patient a correct diagnosis or analysis, but forgets or doesn’t bother to give them what they really need: hope.

Hope could have been given to this patient in the above example in many ways. Hope that something else can be done for them. Hope that there are other options. Hope that they are not alone in this. Hope that we understand their frustrations and encouragement not to give up.

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