The Worst Case I Ever Saw In My Medical Career
Only a small percentage of patient encounters stay with me years after leaving medicine. It’s usually the ones that didn’t go well. The ones that were unique in their complexity or were just truly unsettling.
The human mind has a propensity for the negative and mine is no different.
I remember once leaving a patient and feeling weirdly shaken and hollow like I’d stared into an abyss and walked away emptied of all emotion. Being a doctor gives you a rare window into other people’s lives. It’s a privilege. But sometimes it’s not so easy to distance yourself from the work or leave it behind when you go home. When you step back from that window you take a little bit with you.
Trigger warning: domestic violence
I was on the surgical team when my Registrar (a more senior middle-grade doctor) was called to the Emergency Department (ED) to review a patient.
I was asked to come along to support, but I was unprepared for what we were about to see.
Perched on the edge of a hospital bed was the patient. My eyes were immediately drawn to the dried blood and then to the skin that was hanging loose.
