Passing judgement

• As always, medicine was keeping me on my toes this week. One of the things I find to be continually reinforced in my training is how you cannot judge people from a glance or even a brief interaction with them.

• In the gyne office this week, we had a couple of appointments with young women. They were both in their 20’s, they looked healthy & normal aside from the punk outfit that one of them had on. If you’d seen them on the street, you wouldn’t think of them as sick at all. Taking a history revealed that one of them had just had a donor kidney she received as a toddler surgically removed and is now on the transplant list once again and on dialysis in the meantime every 2^nd day for 3 hours at a time. At 22, she’s had multiple surgeries and was coming in to discuss getting her tubes tied so that she didn’t have to worry about other forms of contraception anymore (since she figured that medically she’s not well enough to get pregnant & carry a baby to term successfully). The other girl has ulcerative colitis (a disabling bowel condition that has occasional flares and an increased risk of colon cancer) and endometriosis (aka retrograde periods in which you shed the lining of your uterus backwards your fallopian tubes into your abdomen vs out the vagina). When she was undergoing surgery for her endometriosis in Alberta, they accidentally cut into her bowel and she’s had no end of troubles ever since. And she’s also just in her 20’s!!

• These patients reminded me that you really can’t make any judgements about people when you first encounter them. Meet someone who’s in a bad mood? Maybe they’ve just received a terrible diagnosis or maybe they’re in serious pain. Previously when I’ve been out with a friend I’ve made the odd comment or two critical of someone around me wearing something I found strange or for some other minor detail, mostly just to get a laugh out of whoever I was with – with no intention of hurting the person I was being critical of. But as I encounter more and more people who trust me to share intimate details of their lives without knowing me at all except by the moniker of “med student”, I no longer have a desire to make my friends laugh by occasionally commenting on someone’s unfortunate choice of shoes. Who knows – maybe they’re colour blind? Hey Geoff? :)