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Because it is

My miscarriage was the worst thing to happen to me – how could my doctor treat it like an everyday event?

It’s a rare event for you – not for him. Just as with death of an adult. Hmm, did I get that diagnosis wrong maybe? But the Doc ain’t gonna be wailing like the family now, is he?

27 thoughts on “Because it is”

  1. Wow, there’s someone who is so self-centered they imagine the world rotates about them.

    The medical doctor is not your personal shrink. They do the mechanical bits not address the crap going on in your head.

  2. Miscarriages are often devastating to both parents and can certainly have an impact on mental health, especially repeated miscarriages.

    Doctors may not be upset personally, but I’d expect them to have some empathy with the patient and be watchful of their mental health.

  3. Accepting miscarriage is very sad for both parents, I am not sure I trust a journalist to tell the truth or be reasonable.

    Doctors frequently are Dicks, but some people, who forever play victim in print for money, are unlikely to have sane or meetable expectations. What this one wants is a healthy baby and medical science simply can’t magic one up from her unreliable womb. Another area where sex ed seems to have failed in schools. There are no guarantees you always get what you want with out heartache.

    Women even if you try to start a family at the ideal breeding age, you may still fail. Suck it up.

  4. Thomas Mann (in Doctor Faustus) on the medical profession dealing with the horror of a child dying in agony:

    “The typical ‘hydrocephalic shriek’, against which only the physician, precisely because he knows it is typical, is tolerably armed. The typical leaves one calm, only what we think of as individual puts us beside ourselves. Science is calm.”

  5. @DocBud
    I agree medicine is not just science and doctors should have some bedside manner – if they don’t forensic medicine is where they should be

  6. It would be nice if doctors were perfect, but in this fallen world what would you prefer? A nice bedside manner or competence?

  7. Bloke in North Dorset

    Its not all doctors who need a good bedside manner and I’d prefer competence over manner, but you’d expect that those dealing with women who’ve had a miscarriage and those dealing with the bereaved of young people would self select to being of a sympathetic nature. That said, every doctor, no matter how sympathetic and even empathetic has a bad day and may have their own emotional problems to deal with.

  8. How’s this for a bedside manner: I said “Merry Christmas”* to my doctor. He said nothing. Literally, nothing.

    * it was Christmas time.

  9. Eh, it’s paywalled, but she still managed to lose me with the first sentence:

    I look at my gorgeous little boy Phoenix…

    Irregardless, she’s right. Miscarriage is a horrible experience for women, and if doctors don’t know how to be kind they should get out of there asap and let someone with empathy comfort the grieving mother.

    Cos that’s what it is, the death a child-to-be. And you can’t treat women like men, telling them to chin up and stiff upper lip it just doesn’t work.

    If the NHS was a private company, would we expect doctors to treat their customers with consideration and grace? Yes we would. But it’s a massive Stalinist monopoly we pay fucktons of tax for, so for some perverse reason we’re meant to be grateful for whatever we’re given.

  10. It’s carefully written so that you can’t be sure that the heartless doc was a woman. But if the hd had been a man we’d have been told, wouldn’t we?

  11. Missus used to work in Neonatal Intensive Care. As you can imagine, many bereft parents, as children die, or have complex needs. She reckoned the staff need to “hold it together” to help the patients

  12. Wife worked many years in ICU, lots of doctors would leave it to the nurses to tell and deal with the relatives.
    As the comment above you just have to hold it together, it’s part of the reason some areas struggle for staffing. My wife always said she could never do neo-natal ICU and the rare youth/teens she dealt with were always bad times for her. NHS doesn’t give a lot of routine mental health support to staff in these situations you are expected to just learn how to deal with it.

  13. Bloke in North Dorset

    “NHS doesn’t give a lot of routine mental health support to staff in these situations you are expected to just learn how to deal with it.”

    Even the military have learned the benefit of mental health care. Its good for the organisation and its good for retention. I heard one story of a young Para doing his final testing and he froze on one of the higher parts of the assault course. Rather than shouting and screaming and then throwing him off throw him off they talked him through it, listened to his concerns and then helped him. He passed and that saved a shit load of money, as well as turning out another para.

  14. @dearieme

    Good point

    Woman or PONA doctor

    I’d go for PONA as in my experience they are very abrupt and uncaring

  15. Sister-in-law is a senior oncologist – having worked for the NHS and in NZ for 25 years, she’s returned to Oxford to do a proper research doctorate, because (as she put it): “25 years of telling people they’re going to die is enough”.

  16. Person(s) of no attribution.
    Or “Pounding Orifice of Nice Asian” if you believe the Urban Dictionary…

  17. Bloke in Costa Rica

    My mother was a nurse and then a senior health visitor. She did time on cancer wards and on paediatric wards (including one time during a trial of an antibiotic which was effectively unblinded by the fact that the nurses knew which patient was given which treatment: all the babies with gastroenteritis given the antibiotic lived, and all those given the placebo died). They all understood the necessity of clinical trials, but that didn’t make it any easier telling a mother her baby had died knowing that they’d effectively been playing Russian roulette with three rounds in the gun. That takes it out of you mentally, and she says that you run the risk of losing either your humanity or your mind and striking a balance was very hard.

    Last time she was in the MAU the staff were wonderful but by criminy there were a lot of foreigners. There was a lovely lady from the Philippines who helped the nurses, a very nice (and gorgeous) doctor from Sweden and an obviously much-loved consultant from India who was kindness itself and went above and beyond to get her checked out a day early. I’d say it was 40% or so non-UK, and this wasn’t in a big city, either. But it did appear to work, although there was a lot of waiting around, notably for the pharmacy to dispense meds. Moral of the story I suppose is the NHS isn’t as bad as some of its detractors claim and certainly not as good as its boosters would have you believe.

  18. @dearieme

    “Person(s) of no appearance” – yes.

    As in “White man punches Owen Jones in homophobic attack” vs “Man throws Owen Jones off top of building”

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