Ooh, Shiny!

[davidgillon]

…. or the difficulty of keeping specialists focussed on what you want, rather than what interests them.

I saw a new specialist last night, this one a spinal surgeon, but the appointment didn’t go entirely to plan. What I really wanted to talk about was the holistic effects of having injuries at both lumbar and cervical spine, and the fact that what would be a comparatively simple neck/arm problem for anyone else compromises my entire mobility, because it’s interfering with using crutches. She just wanted to talk necks.

Now to give her her due, she did do a reasonably full work-up and did talk to me about the lumbar issues, but no more than reasonable, I don’t think she really understood the extent to which things revolve around my pelvis, and she just plain wasn’t interested in how I’m disabled by the pain I experience, barely so by the fact I spent most of March only sleeping on alternate nights. The pain interested her, what it meant for me didn’t.

I’m reasonably happy about the fact she’s sending me for nerve conduction tests, no matter they are reportedly unpleasant, I’m very happy that she’s thinking about sending me back to pain management, because they will listen to me, but is it too much to ask that she listens to me too?

Comments

[techiebabe.livejournal.com]

Actually, being listened to is something I noticed today. In life I'm used to being listened to. Partly this is because I am well informed(!)

However having given my consultant a letter she wanted me to hear her reply and she carried on responding without letting me interject. As it goes I did cover my point later but I completely forgot to ask for more scripts, which means I have to run the gauntlet of trying to get a GP appointment in the next week - bugger and more bugger.

I noticed at the time - there was a moment when I thought "please be quiet and let me speak, I'm too busy trying to remember thoughts to listen to you"... not what normally happens, but annoying when it does.

[dwgism.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've been thinking about it some more and at no point did she actually ask me what I wanted from the appointment, which I think is the core of why I'm less than happy with how it went.

[techiebabe.livejournal.com]

Mine is usually fine but this time she wanted to say "I've spoken to Dr H and he says [she spills] because [spills more]" without giving me a chance to say "oh, does that mean..." - it was more of a telling than a conversation, which is unusual for her.

Never mind, it was useful in the end.

Whereas yours wasn't so good - I guess you need a technique for dealing with that next time. So instead of them saying what they have to offer and then getting you out the door, you need to jump in and say "I hope you don't mind but I brought a list of questions..." - could that work?

[dwgism.livejournal.com]

It's difficult to say, she was running over half an hour late and it was after 7PM, so I don't know if I got typical-her or harried-her. I'd worked up a diagram showing where I get pain, which we used when talking through what was going on and which clearly had more notes attached to the back, but she very deliberately pushed that back across the table to me rather than look at them.

I'm due to see her again after the nerve-conduction tests, if she does want to go for an epidural injection, which she indicated was likely, then she'll pretty much have to sit down and answer my concerns about the procedure and I should be able to work everything into there. Whether I can get her to take notice of it is another thing.