Everyone wants to be an expert
“Next, you’ll want me to take my own blood!” I reply, hoping my tone is light, but fearing otherwise. The tech has just withdrawn the needle from my arm having extracted enough blood for my doctor to confirm my thyroxine dose is still right.* As has happened so many times in recent years, my tech asks if I would like to get the results online. And as I always do, I have declined.
To help him understand this isn’t personal between us, I launch in my “everyone wants to be an expert” speech.
“I have a family doctor who can look at the results and tell me if there’s anything I need to know. Just like I pay to have someone draft my will, to have my house built, and for a haircut. And please don’t get me started on scanning my purchases at Shoppers Drug Mart. I hate hate hate that! And so should the staff who are pointing me to the self-checkouts.”
My tech nods sympathetically but I see the familiar ‘why do I always get the nut-jobs?’ look in his eyes.
Yes, I know I'm leaning against the prevailing winds. I acknowledge we all have access to a lot of technology that can help us do a lot of things we previously couldn’t or help us analyze rudimentary information. But we’ve overly complicated our lives while eliminating a whole slew of jobs. Is that really where we want society to go?
If I didn’t already have a sense doctors should do doctoring and patients should be patient, this was hammered home when Jack was diagnosed with lung cancer. At our first visit to the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, we were given a sign-on to the patient portal and told to use it for managing appointments and to view results. If you knew Jack (and if you know me) you’d know the chances were 0 that he would take charge of appointment management so I signed on as Andrzej Sikorski (his legal name). As the number of professionals anxious to help Jack grew, I was grateful to be able to manage the schedule online.
The results side of things troubled me from the start. Newsflash - I’m not a doctor. Neither am I a lab tech, radiologist, dietician, oncology nurse, or any of the other wide range of folks who might be able to interpret aspects of the uploaded technical reports and assessments.
Initially, that didn’t stop me from looking: “‘Occluded’ doesn’t sound good, right?” I’d share with Jack. “Look at this. Am I imagining there’s a new shadow here? Do you think they missed it?”
He’d reply, “well, we’ll have to ask at the next appointment.” Jack was a let’s-not-worry-until-we-have-something-to-worry-about kinda guy.
And I’m most definitely not that guy. I’d angst over it - sometimes silently but usually not, causing turmoil between us. Although we could sometimes get phone advice from the nursing team, that was only possible during the week. On the weekend, I’d be stuck with rising blood pressure and sleepless nights. And to what end? Other than allowing me a chance to give it a clever name - scanxiety - nothing I could do would change the outcome.
Other caregivers I know have become Internet doctors. You know them: the ones for whom poring over wiki entries and skimming the abstracts of PhD dissertations equals the years of academic study and hand-on experience required of medical practice. Talking to them reinforced my feelings of inadequacy about caregiving. Why was I wasting my increasingly rare free time walking the dogs or wailing on the phone with friends when I should be leapfrogging over an undergraduate science degree and all the years of med school and residency?
Maybe it’s because I saw the kinds of messes people who get themselves into by not seeking legal advice. Or maybe it’s because I appreciate the value of education. Or maybe it’s because I am suspicious of things on the Internet. Or maybe I really am just lazy. Regardless, I am as innocent about interpreting MRI results now as I was in the pre-lung cancer days.
So while I am not equating interpreting bloodwork results and their relationship to a cancer drug to waving my toothbrush UPC code over a scanner, I am alarmed by the trend towards making everything self-service. Let’s work hard to keep people employed doing things for each other. If nothing else, the social interaction is worth it.
* I had a thyroidectomy nearly 30 years ago because of a goitre that was becoming worthy of its own Seinfeld episode (look it up - very funny). From this and other weird but not immediately life-threatening issues, I’ve had a lot of bloodwork done.
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