MUNCHHAUSEN

 

MUNCHHAUSEN & ME

I hate hospitals!  Do all I can to avoid them. Doesn’t help. Best guess is I’ve been in a dozen; as to exact number of times, even God has lost track. My kids no longer miss a beat hearing daddy is in hospital. To save time for the various folk who are going to ask same questions they always ask, I carry a card with my top-10 procedures.

Have developed a ‘prudent man’ rule which has meant being able to not go any hospital about nineteen out of twenty times I’m ‘symptomatic’ – ‘If chest pains are both significant and sustained the prudent man with history of heart issues goes to nearest ER’.

Upon going to ER, as any who may be asked says must be done, we travel a well-worn path. Been through schnick so often I know when they miss a step. Always ends with night in Observation Ward. As one doctor told me, given what my card tells them would get me a night in any hospital in the country “just to cover our legal liability”.

Last month had something of a 25th not-anniversary. Naturally I celebrated by making an inspection tour of two local emergency room facilities and review of area’s finest Observation Ward. It’s actually a long story, but I do have a lot of long stories.

The story I remember almost every time I do the ER thing is about that first encounter now these 25 years past.

Sunday, May 23, 2021 was the 25^th anniversary of very first time anyone ever suggested I had heart problem. A suggestion including 10-day very traumatic confinement in a ‘teaching’ hospital. A stay begun with my first ER visit. Visit made more traumatic both by having no preparation for such a situation, and by knowledge my father had died at about that age under similar circumstances. It may well have been last time I was really scared by such encounters (put a pin in that scared thing).

Apparently Interns in big city teaching hospitals are not required to have command of English language as spoken in America. An Intern of obvious Asian decent lacking a certain familiarity with English took my “medical history”. A history which at the time was non-existent regarding the heart problems they assured me I was having. He asked what drugs I was on. Is ‘none’ an answer? Should have stuck with that. Instead I answered “Advil”. Said it more than once. Nurse, probably a St Louis native, repeated it. One of us spelled it for him “A-D-V-I-L”. He wrote in to the official record that I was taking Paxil.

Was in hospital over a week, underwent numerous tests (good insurance will do that), and was given to understand I had ‘serious’ heart problem. Turns out it was not-all-that-serious. But, what did I know?

At some point I accidentally learned they were actually “treating” for Munchhausen Syndrome. FYI this syndrome is “a mental disorder in which a person repeatedly feigns severe illness so as to obtain hospital treatment”. A treatment embarked upon because Paxil is almost always issued by a psychiatrist, by whom they assumed I was being treated. Fact Check: I need spell-checker just to type word psychiatrist.

So, every time I’m overwhelmed by a ‘prudent man’ situation I reluctantly end up in someone’s Emergency Room. As much as able always try to treat everyone in a way of which my father would be proud. I do what they ask me to do, and cautiously endure hospital food.

A lot of times they find some really bad thing going on inside my body (see my card). But, as happened with last month’s round, many times they just say ‘you didn’t have a heart attack’ and send me home. When they do I find myself wondering if I’m being treated for Munchhausen Syndrome?

Kay says I should stop saying I’m in ‘perfect health’ (except for that heart thing). She might be right. Maybe it’d be harder to hate hospitals if something else was wrong? Surely Baron von Munchhausen would approve.

Dear Doctor

 

An Open Letter to the Doctors in My Life

Dear Doctor,

By actual count over these some seventy-seven years I have been one of your inmates on no less than fifty occasions in eleven different hospitals covering four states, seen by so many doctors of medicine passing my way that even God has lost track. After a while, and now having doctors younger than my grandson, an old man does make some observations worth sharing.

     One of the many things my father taught me is that if a man has earned the right to be called “doctor’ he has earned the right to be called ‘doctor”. Yeah, okay, he died never having met a woman doctor. I’ve always attempted to treat doctors with the respect my father taught.

     In writing it is called ‘the curse of knowledge’. That is, forgetting the hearer does not know what you know. Never assume the patient knows what you know, they do not. You get the big bucks for knowing that doctor stuff, not me.

     Any of us patient-types is a fool to expect the doctor to be all-knowing. My father died in 1966 of problems which have been quickly and almost routinely dealt with in my life time. A lot more was learned since, and will be learned henceforth. You don’t know it all. You may want me to think you do, but you don’t. And, I have no right to expect you so to do. Things will change. There is more to learn. You’re almost smart enough to be a doctor, so you should be able to learn from the changes.

     We patients really do go through a lot more stuff than the nurses tell you. We change doctors and the new guys don’t know the trouble we’ve seen. I can never expect you to remember everything I’ve gone through, that’s my job. Your job is to be familiar enough with my case to know I gone though a lot of stuff. BTW: If you walk in the door, as one did, not even knowing I was a heart patient, we are both in trouble.

     Don’t ask me what I “want”. I don’t want any of this stuff! Tell me what you want to do and why. That’s why we call you ‘doctor’. I’ll pretend to understand what you’re talking about and do it. And, if you ain’t worried, neither am I.

     All that is fair to ask of you is this: That I believe you care what happens to me. Make us patients feel you care about the outcome and we will all talk about what a great doctor you are wherever you go, as long as you practice, whatever you don’t know.

Respectfully submitted,

David L Lewis