Real life drama: No such thing as an uninteresting patient!
Dr Faith Fitzgerald, MD, always held as a matter of faith that there is no such thing as an uninteresting patient!
One day her chief resident informed her that there were no interesting patients on their inpatient service. She challenged the team to name the “most uninteresting” patient of all, resolved that she would quickly prove to them how interesting a seemingly boring patient really is. The patient they selected was an elderly woman who was only in the hospital because she had been evicted from her apartment and had nowhere else to go.
Faith sat down with the woman and began asking her questions. Go on to to read what happened.
***
What did she do for a living?
Hotel maid.
Had she ever cleaned the room of a famous person?
No.
How long had she lived here?
Years and years.
All of her responses were monosyllabic, and she seemed to have absolutely nothing interesting to relate.
Concerned that her dictum was about to be refuted, in desperation Faith finally asked her whether she had ever been in the hospital before. The patient averred that she had been hospitalized once, when she was a child.
Why?
Because she had broken her arm.
And how did that happen?
A trunk fell on it.
A trunk?
Yes.
What kind of trunk?
A steamer trunk.
How did that happen?
The boat lurched.
The boat?
Yes, the boat that was carrying me from Ireland to America.
And why did the boat lurch?
Read on to find who she was!
***
It hit the iceberg.
Oh! And what was the name of the boat?
The Titanic!
The patient had been a steerage passenger aboard the Titanic, made it to one of the lifeboats, and, after landing, was taken to hospital to have her broken arm set.
As soon as this chapter in the patient’s life story emerged, she was no longer uninteresting. In fact, her story became the talk of the team, the hospital, and the local news media, who promptly arranged an interview.
So long as her physicians failed to ask the right questions, there was not much to be said about her. But when the right question was posed, she went from being the most uninteresting patient on the service to the most interesting patient in the city.
There is a powerful lesson in Faith’s story for radiologists; namely, that there is always more to a patient than meets the eye. Doctors may not have the time to meet every patient or to engage every patient in conversation for sufficient time to elucidate their story, but it is vital that every health professional practice with an awareness that radiologic images do not tell the whole story.
Every such image is merely the tip of an iceberg. The dignity of the patient and the meaning of the patient’s life reside elsewhere, behind the image. There is always more to the patient than meets the radiologist’s eye.