American Pie: The Good Patient
...The many yearnings I expressed were greeted by my parents with the standard, and after a while, anticipated response of “You’ll have to be patient and wait until the war is over.”
My first pair of long pants, a bicycle, an air rifle, a vacation by the sea, all were greeted by that same response...
A surgeon recently thanked John Merchant for being a "good'' patient - but is his patience wearing thin?
To read more of John's columns, crafted it must be said with patience and skill, please click on American Pie in the menu on this page.
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Patient n One who receives medical attention, care, or treatment.
Patient adj Bearing or enduring pain, difficulty, provocation, or annoyance with calmness.
Patient adj Capable of calmly awaiting an outcome or result; not hasty or impulsive.
I consider myself fortunate that I haven’t been called upon to be a patient many times in my life, but all too often I have been required to be patient. I learned patience as a child, not willingly, but of necessity. Living my early childhood through World War II, it seemed that any aspect of growing up was on hold, except of course getting bigger. The many yearnings I expressed were greeted by my parents with the standard, and after a while, anticipated response of “You’ll have to be patient and wait until the war is over.”
My first pair of long pants, a bicycle, an air rifle, a vacation by the sea, all were greeted by that same response. It was a gift to parents of young children, and I knew there was no point in whining because many times there would be an air raid the same night to remind me that truly there was a “War on.” And the war lasted long enough that most of my yearnings became irrelevant. But I did become an expert in the art of delayed gratification, which isn’t a particularly useful talent if you want to achieve anything in life.
My limited experience as a patient hasn’t served me very well either. Receiving medical attention, care, or treatment I can do; even bearing or enduring pain, but I fail miserably at dealing calmly with difficulty, provocation, or annoyance. It seems the older I get the more provocation and annoyance I encounter, though I’m prepared to believe that it is me and not the world that has changed. These days, everything has to work perfectly, and when things don’t I obsess about it until it gets fixed.
Between my wife and I, we have a number of computers and a heap of peripherals: scanners. printers, external hard drives, routers, modems, you name it, and I manage to deal with most of their glitches most of the time. But recently we took the plunge into surround sound, feeling that we were missing out on all the wonderful new advances in home entertainment. Installing it really put my ability to deal with “difficulty, provocation, or annoyance” to the test. My advice to anyone considering such a move is either don’t, or pay whatever the retailer demands to set up the system.
If you think operating a VCR is a challenge, setting up surround sound is akin to flying the Space Shuttle, comparatively speaking. The user’s manual was half an inch thick, which should have told me something, but I was good, and read it from cover to cover - again, and again, and again. I wrestled with the terminology and the seemingly endless options until I thought I had it right. But then when I sat down to listen to my expensive toy, there was always something not quite right, or that could be better.
In my recent role as a patient, I came to wonder what exactly was expected of me. When the surgeon and I finally parted ways, I thanked him for his skills and dedication to a job well done. It was his response that set me to wondering about my role. He thanked me for being a “good” patient. What exactly did that mean? Was I good because I did what I was told, or was it that I was “good” because I recovered? And if things had gone terribly wrong and I hadn’t recovered, would I have been a “bad” patient?
Then again, was I “good” because I hadn’t called him at ten o’clock on a Sunday night to say I couldn’t sleep due to the pain from what he had done to my knee? My concept of being a patient is one of expectation rather than contribution. Since I am not often a patient, I expect to receive ministrations and to have what ails me fixed with a minimum of active participation on my part. I have this fond dream of returning to a state of early childhood, where all my needs would be catered for.
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