Morning Rounds, me seeing 60 y/o lady after her elective spine surgery
Me: How are you?
Patient: Terrible! starts crying
Me: What's wrong?
Patient: My boyfriend broke up with me! He said he couldn't handle me being in the hospital! We've been dating since February and everything was going so well!
Me: I'm very sorry to hear that...
Patient: Can you give me an anti-depressant?
Feelings are overrated.
And so went the story of my time on the psychiatry consult service. Never before had I so quickly lost respect for so many different specialties...
ReplyDeleteI am assuming this story did not end there, so THANK YOU.
"Can you come and... talk to the patient? They're... crying."
We have totally done that. I usually ask "any stressors in your life" as part of my neurological history. Sometimes, the parent starts bawling and I don't know what to do with it. Then I kick parent out and the kid finally opens up: "a lot of my family died recently and im really scared of dying." That's not a conversation you end in five minutes.
DeleteWe usually call psych not so much because "patient is crying", but because psych is apparently a very limited service with months-long waitlists, and this way the patient gets hooked up a bit faster with some resources (hopefully).
Maybe if the anti-depressant's name is Lance.
ReplyDelete