Monday 1 October 2012

Dudeee, Work on Saturday was just...

Sorry, I haven't been posting as regularly! A2 is taking over my life and really does require a lot of dedication and stuff. So yeah, doing three subjects, I assumed will be so much easier than doing 5 AS's but boy, was I wrong! My A2 subjects require so much time! Its really draining, but by God's grace, I will be able to survive, and you will too! Just less than a year to go!

Right, onto what this post was really about. Work on Saturday. 

Its Saturday morning, 9am, I collect the GP's keys from the local corner shop and open up the surgery. As time goes on, I realise I'm manning the GP surgery all by myself. Oh. My. Gosh. A whole GP surgery left to a 17 year old again! Suddenly I started to worry, oh my gosh, what if things go wrong? What do I do? What if I make a mistake? But I had to calm myself down, and take it on the chin. I was only there until 4pm, what's the worst that could happen, right?

It is now 1pm and the clinic starts. Patients start coming in. One patient comes in with her son, he's expecting a pre-school booster. First of all, the doctor who does the clinic on Saturday does not do injections without them being prepared for him, because otherwise he wastes time preparing them. But me being me, I assumed he'd prepare this one on his own. Just before she was due to go and see the doctor for her son, the doctor calls me through the telephone from his office into the reception and tells me he cannot do it without the injection being prepared for him. Unfortunately, I was not trained to prepare the injections! And I was alone, so who else would prepare it, certainly not the doctor.

So guess who had to break the news to the patient? Me, of course. With the drop of the phone, I called the patient over to the reception desk and told her the news. It went something like this:

Me: I'm really sorry about this, but I'm afraid your son cannot get his injection because we don't have someone to prepare the injection for your son today but I can reschedule another appointment for it to be done, is Monday fine for you?

Obviously, she flipped out! Well, of course she would, she had been waiting to see the doctor and at the last minute this was cancelled on her. So her being angry was totally justified. But this was my first time dealing with an angry patient! Inside, I was panicking, terrified and upset at the same time, but I couldn't show this emotion. So how did I deal with it? I apologised profusely and carried a calm tone when speaking to her even though I was the total opposite inside. I tried to calm her down by offering an appointment for Monday and it worked! It was a total relief when she left though. I guess, I'm not used to such anger towards me. But I used it as a lesson, as obviously if I want to be a doctor, I do have to learn to deal with such patients at times, not all patients will come in happy as rainbows and unicorns.




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