Indexing Title: NALUDINOs Medical Anecdotal Report [04-7]

MAR Title: A Man Above the Rest

Date of Medical Observation:  October 16, 2004

Narration:

It was the usual Saturday duty. Patients kept coming in. Most of these were medico legal some were of other various cases. It seemed like we would be settling into another one of those routine Saturday duties. I guess I was wrong.

A muscular young man in his early 20’s, was brought to the emergency room. He had a self-inflicted wound at his left wrist. He tried to commit suicide and was very unruly. He was constantly shouting and he kept on challenging us to a fight. It seemed that this young man had a death wish.

Things took a turn for the worse when a policeman arrived. The patient apparently tried to attack the officer and they were engaged in a shouting match.

It was at this point that my senior resident tried to intervene and talked to the patient with a calm voice. Upon seeing that the wound was no longer bleeding, he decided that we should let the patient calm down first before we try to institute treatment measures. After a while, the patient went to sleep. The patient woke up a different man. He was no longer combative. We were the able to treat his wound properly.

Insights (Physical, Psychosocial, Ethical) (Discovery, Stimulus, Reinforcements)

Be patient. Be calm. But most of all, understand. It is not always wise to fight fire with fire.  Some patients need to have our understanding and support. We may have to dig harder, look at things other than those presented to us to fully understand the patient. We must maintain a higher level of decorum when dealing with patients. A lesser man would have accepted the patients challenge and things would have turned out differently. That is why people look up to doctors. We are expected to be calm when they are not, to be rational when most are not and yet keep both feet on the ground.