Be Kinder than Necessary - Everyone is Fighting Some Kind of Battle

This week, I was verbally abused by a patient. He was scheduled to have a portacath placement under sedation. He needed the portacath so that he could start chemotherapy for newly diagnosed pancreatic cancer. Pancreatic cancer does not have a good prognosis.

I asked him my routine medical questions, which he sarcastically and bitterly answered without looking at me. I took him back to the operating room and applied the monitors. He looked up at me helplessly from the OR table and in a different voice from that which he had answered my previous questions, said, "I don't want to feel any pain," to which I replied, "I am not going to leave your side. I will make sure you are comfortable." He drifted off to sleep, and did not flinch when the surgeon injected or made the incision. At the end of the procedure, he began his ranting and bitterness again against all of us in the operating room. As we were about to wheel him to the recovery room, he looked me in the eye and said in a soft voice that cracked, "For all it's worth, thank you."