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I’d been in post for 2/7 on a general medical ward and a nurse called me urgently to see a patient who was fitting. I had never seen the patient before and I just couldn’t think what to do. The patient was violently thrashing about and making some awful groaning noises. All the nurses were looking at me and I still couldn’t think what to do other than put a cannula in and turn the patient on her side. One of the nurses shouted that she was going to call for help and the team came within a few minutes but it felt like hours. The anaesthetist treated the patient, took me aside and asked me what happened. I was so stressed I could barely think straight. She said something about ‘what will you do next time, that’s the measure that you need to think about’ which at the time really didn’t help. The nurses seemed to avoid me afterwards which made me feel even more like an incompetent idiot.

I went home and felt so stressed that I just hit the bottle, I couldn’t sleep or eat or think about anything other than what happened. I felt really isolated, worthless and my confidence hit rock bottom. The anaesthetist’s comment came to me a couple of times and made me want to try a bit harder to make a bad situation better. I wrote everything about the incident down in my portfolio which only served to make me sob out loud but somehow made me feel a bit stronger. I made an appointment to see my supervisor and talked it all through with him. He arranged for me to spend some time in the simulation suit going through the management of the fitting patient and working through some scenarios. I felt so much more confident afterwards and suggested that ‘how to manage the fitting patient’ should go on the induction programme for all new foundation doctors.

I went home that evening and knew that it was highly likely that throughout my career I was going to have to deal with stress and very difficult emotional situations on a fairly frequent basis. Drinking excessively to help me cope with the stress made me feel worse and I realised how easy it is to develop a nasty habit to knock myself unconscious. I decided to take up running, stop drinking on work nights, eat properly and tried harder to widen my social circle. Stress is part of everyday life for a doctor and somehow or other I found a way to both prevent it and manage it.