The caring profession(s)

My Grandmother has breast cancer. She had a mastectomy and was given the all-clear. However, something else appeared on her skin and tests have shown that she now has it for good. So she has lots of treatment.

One of the problems that she is currently facing is allergy to dressings (which may or may not be drug induced). She has to have lots of dressings on her arms because of massive lymphoedema (some as worse as elephantiasis) and she simply cannot tolerate some of the dressings. I think it's fair to say that she is pretty fed-up. She now has to have radiotherapy - she went for it the other day to be told be the radiologist/radiographer(?) that the line up for the radiation beam "doesn't look right" so she has to arrange another appointment.

On top of all these problems, she has to put up with the caring professions. Nana is a strong willed woman. She has lots of pride and will stand up to almost anyone and anything. I have lots of respect for her. This is why I cringe when she tells me that whenever she goes to clinic or whenever the nurse comes to give her the Herceptin that's keeping her alive, she has to put up with people saying "ooooh, you poor woman." The other day everything was too much for her. She lashed out. "I'm not a poor bloody woman, i'm fine, i've just got a bit of a rash and breast cancer." True, infact Nana says that at the moment she's felt better than she has at any other time during her treatment.

You may think, in all fairness, that whoever was on the receiving end of that was only doing their job. Of course, any first day medical student knows that healthcare is primarily about the care. But in my short time as a healthcare professional, i've witnessed many other professionals, perhaps even myself, being over-patronising and perhaps even insulting to patients in the pursuit of "good care." Some people don't want to be molly-coddled all the time and told how "poor" they are. They may appreciate a bit of empathy every now and then, but i'm quite sure that they won't want people telling them how bad everything is for them at the moment.

And i'm sure that they don't want nurses a quarter of their age shouting "Oh no...let's get that cleaned up" as if they are young children in their ears when their incontinence has got the better of them like happens in certain wards in a certain local hospital.

I'm surprised that there aren't more lash-outs.