Surgeon: “You need a colonoscopy. It will be on Friday. Arrange transport home, because you won’t be able to drive. Are you on medication?”

Me: “Yes, [Strong Stimulant For ADHD]. Why, will I be knocked out?”

Surgeon: “Anaethetised? Not quite, only sedated. Either way, it takes a while to wear off.”

Me: “Can I cycle there and get a train back?”

Surgeon: *Pauses* “Yes, but you have to walk back to the train station. The nurse will ask you about sixty questions. She has to be sure who you are, so be patient.”

A colonoscopy. Lovely. On Friday, I am escorted to the private room. I am told to take off everything — underwear, jewellery, the bunch — and wear only the theatre gown. I lie under the duvet and read a book, waiting for the nurse.

In walks the stereotypical matron — a short, plump woman aged about sixty. She speaks in a plain, English accent, and she’s very terse with no sense of humour. I’m a young man.

Nurse: “I am here to ask you some questions. I need to go through them all in order, and I need an exact answer — nothing more, nothing less. Do you understand?”

She’s right. Patients have died because the wrong patient was operated on, etc.

Me: “Yes.”

Nurse: “What is your full name?”

Me: “[My Full Name].”

Nurse: “What is your date of birth?”

Me: “[Date, month, year].”

Nurse: “What procedure are you having?”

Me: “A colonoscopy.”

Nurse: “Have you taken off all your clothes?”

Me: “Yes.”

Nurse: “Are you currently wearing corrective spectacles?”

I pause for a minute and consider saying something silly, but I don’t trouble her. She is still looking down at her clipboard.

Me: “No.”

Nurse: “Are you currently wearing contact lenses?”

Me: “No.”

Nurse: “Do you normally need vision corrected?”

Me: “Yes.”

Nurse: “What transport home have you arranged?”

Me: “I will take the train.”

Now she’s looking agitated and confused. Somehow, these questions aren’t going as she expected. She looks at the floor, at my cycle helmet, lycra shorts and top, and cycling shoes — lots of hi-viz. Finally, she looks up.

Nurse: “How did you get here today?”

Me: “I cycled.”

Nurse: “How far?”

Me: “Twenty km.”

Nurse: “Where are your spectacles?”

Me: “Home.”

She puts down the clipboard.

Nurse: “How did you see to get here?”

Me: “Contact lenses.”

Nurse: “Where are they now?”

Me: “In the bin.”

Nurse: “How will you see to get to the train?”

She looks again at all of my cycling stuff.

Nurse: “Does the surgeon know about this?”

Me: “Yes. Check with him.”

She leaves. Enter the surgeon.

Surgeon: “Hey, [My Name]! Ready to get a camera shoved up your a**e?”

Me: “Mister [Doctor]! Depends if I can get past Judge Judy there. She seems to have a problem with my eyesight… or trains. What’s going on?”

Surgeon: “Yeah, she’s a bit procedural, but she has to do it exactly as it’s written. Patients have tried to drive home, crashed, and then sued hospitals. She has a list of allowable forms of transport, which doesn’t include trains. Even if it did, you have so much lycra with you that she doesn’t know whether to believe you.”

Me: “You approved it. What do you want me to tell her?”

Surgeon: *Pauses* “Just change your answer to taxi. Look, the sedative affects everyone differently. You of all people know whether you would be safe getting home because you have been managing your own concentration levels with [Stimulant] for years. I’m happy with anything other than driving. Just tell her taxi.”

Me: “Okay. What about the glasses thing?”

Surgeon: “Yeah, she can’t figure out how you’re going to see anything because you threw out your contact lenses.”

Me: “She could have asked. I brought spares.”

Surgeon: “She could have asked. [Nurse], come in, please. He’s brought spare contact lenses to see on his way home. Ask [My Name] how he is getting home again.”

Nurse: “What transport have you arranged home?”

Me: “A taxi.”

Nurse: *Smiling brightly* “Excellent. Off to theatre, then.”

The colonoscopy happens. I don’t remember much thanks to the sedative. I get dressed, take some [Stimulant] (per my prescription), and go to the cafe. I feel wide awake. It’s just like a normal day… so I cycle home.

The follow-up appointment comes the next week.

Surgeon: “How did you get home?”

Me: “I had some [Stimulant], that knocked the sedative out of me in an hour, and I cycled all the way home to [Town].”

Surgeon: *Laughing* “The nurse was right not to believe you! How did you feel the drug was working? Did you feel at all sleepy?”

Me: “Not at all. I was wide awake.”

The surgeon just laughed again, wrote the final report, and discharged me.

I’m a nurse in a hospital ward. I’m standing in the nurse’s station, trying to decipher how a medication is supposed to be given.

The medical teams are doing their ward rounds, so there’s a whole gaggle of doctors present discussing things amongst themselves, so I figure I’ll outsource this problem.

Me: “Hey, can someone translate some doctor’s handwriting for me?”

There’s a small laugh from the group.

Doctor #1: “Yeah, sure.” *Looks at my paper* “Oh, that’s my writing!”

There was a much larger giggle from the assembled medical team.

Hey, at least it meant he knew immediately what it said!

This story was told to me by one of the participants. There is a lot of background and associated internal politics and policies that I’ll not go into for the sake of brevity.

In a Japanese private hospital in the 1990s, there is a doctor — let’s call him Dr. Painful — who firmly believes that all painkillers, and especially the stronger opiates available, are not necessary and are even harmful. He either doesn’t prescribe any or seriously under-prescribes. Despite protests from the nurses and other doctors, he persists in this belief. His direct management, as well as their manager, are spineless toadies who refuse to overrule this doctor’s decisions, and his colleagues aren’t allowed to directly interfere.

One day, a patient is admitted claiming extreme pain in the abdomen. Dr. Painful claims it can’t possibly be that bad and predictably refuses to prescribe sufficient painkillers. This woman is crying in pain, but he won’t budge, despite the protests of the patient, the nurses, and other doctors. Finally, one of the nurses loses it and jumps several levels of management to browbeat the director into taking action.

Another doctor from a different department overhears this conversation and volunteers to take the patient for an MRI, where they discover a cancerous growth. Yes, its location would cause extreme pain. At this point, the patient’s mother has already moved the patient to another hospital, so there’s no follow-up. The nurse is reprimanded for daring to jump over direct management, despite an acknowledgment that nothing would have happened had she not done so. Nothing happens to Dr. Painful, as far as anyone knows.

Sometime later, Dr. Painful is admitted to that same hospital for a hernia. He’s in a lot of pain. The doctor he’s assigned to writes his prescription, quote: “Dr. Painful special treatment: no pain medication.” Dr. Painful is crying in pain and begging for painkillers, but the nurses and the other doctors refuse to give him any. He is shown the prescription, saying that he’s receiving the same treatment he gives to his own patients, and they wouldn’t want to insult him by doing anything different. They quote him at every turn, using his own excuses against him each time he asks. Lucky for him, the hernia is shortly resolved and he’s discharged.

Dr. Painful never stinted on painkillers after that episode. Seems pain can teach empathy after all.

I’m not feeling well and I am taking the day off to recuperate. It’s a head cold and nothing to do with the chest, but I do have a sore throat and runny nose.

Work requires a doctor’s note if I want to get paid. I can’t make an appointment at my old doctor’s office because I live too far away and they need to have seen me within a year to be able to do a phone appointment. The new doctor near me won’t see me because of cold symptoms; I need a negative [health crisis illness] test result to see them first.

I go and take the [illness] test, and I need to wait a couple of days for the test result.

My work could have just said it was fine for the one day, but now I have a note for the [illness] test, and I legally have to isolate for the next three days. I am gonna enjoy them after my head cold clears up!

I’ve had sleep problems for my entire life, taking multiple hours and often tears in order to fall asleep every night.

Finally, when I am sixteen and starting to have trouble staying asleep, as well, a teacher of mine convinces my mother to take me to a doctor about it. I have social anxiety and am already an avid reader of this site, so I am nervous going in. I’ve only been to this doctor a few times before, but he is very nice so I am able to convince myself everything will be perfectly fine.

Then, we get to the office only to find out that my doctor isn’t in, and his colleague will be seeing me instead. Slight panic, but nothing too bad yet. I go into the exam room and explain that I’m there to get a reference to a sleep specialist. Easy enough, right? Well, she needs to go through all the exam steps first, but that’s easy. We start off normally, going through my symptoms and then my family history. When she gets to my father’s side, I explain that my mother is single and had me through a sperm bank, so I haven’t the faintest about his medical history. Suddenly, her body language closes off and I start to panic a bit about having said something wrong.

She starts asking more and more questions about my problems staying asleep, which mostly involves waking up long enough to roll over before falling back asleep. I keep reiterating that my real problem is taking no less than an hour to fall asleep every night, which she keeps brushing off. Anxiety levels rising.

Doctor: “Drink some lavender tea and read before bed.”

She says it like that is somehow helpful (and like I haven’t already tried that).

Eventually, she turns to me, places a hand on my knee, and says in the most condescending tone of voice that I’ve heard before or since:

Doctor: “Are sure the problem isn’t that you’re depressed because you have no father figure?”

I kind of blue-screened for a minute, because… what? I managed to stammer out something that I’m pretty sure was a denial, but by that point, I just wanted to get this appointment over with.

She continued talking over me, not listening to what I had to say, and generally being condescending for the rest of the conversation, which my brain has conveniently blurred from my memory. It’s bad enough that I had to fight down tears (I was a bit of a crier).

Unfortunately, she noticed and tried to “comfort” me by saying she knew how hard it was to confront mental issues. She also declared that I had depression, restless leg syndrome, and also probably sleep apnea, which is why I kept waking up (completely glossing over the not-falling-asleep thing, again). I was advised to get treatment “before I died in my sleep,” which is not a reassuring thing to say to anyone. She did write me a reference to an actual sleep doctor, though.

I managed to hold myself together long enough to make it back to my mother’s car, where I proceeded to cry and possibly have an anxiety attack about all that. Thankfully, my next appointment that day was with my therapist, so that all got worked out pretty quickly.

Oh, and when I went to the sleep doctor? I was pretty much immediately diagnosed with a delayed circadian rhythm, likely at least partially due to some medical malpractice that occurred in my infancy. The waking up was likely caused by my body thinking I was just trying to take a nap, apparently. No restless legs, and certainly no sleep apnea. The doctor advised me to take some melatonin and get a job on the night shift once I was old enough.

I now actually get to sleep relatively quickly, and the day after getting my first full night’s sleep was practically life-changing. Who knew it was possible to be energetic and not constantly tired? I guess it all worked out all right in the end, though that lady still makes me nervous about going to new doctors.