understanding pain

Today I went to a mental hospital to listen to a public lecture on dementia only to doze off until the lecture was over and people started asking questions.  My mother had come too, and curiously, we ended up having very different impressions on the director who gave the lecture -- she thought he was overbearing and that he looked down on patients' families; I thought he was humorous and had a deep understanding towards patients (or maybe accepted the fact that he did not understand them fully).

An old man (probably around 80) asked a question about his wife who was taken care of at the hospital but was about to be discharged.  He was concerned about her roaming habits and asked if it was a good idea to hang a cell phone around her neck and put a name tag on her shirt, to which the director answered that in the first place, we all had to remember that no one roamed because they liked it.  Patients roam around because they are anxious; they don't know where they are, they don't know who they are, and so they roam around.  He added that maybe the patient didn't want to have a cell phone hanging around her neck; maybe she didn't want to have a name tag on her shirt; and maybe she didn't want to walk around shouting at the whole world that she had Alzheimer's.  Maybe she still wants dignity.

My mother pointed out that the director had an overbearing attitude towards the old man who was desperate.  He was clearly worried about how to take care of his wife.  It wasn't like he didn't think of her as a human being anymore; he was just... worried.  He didn't need a lecture on how to let her live with dignity.

A care worker also asked what she should do when patients asked if they could go home.  They asked every day, over and over, and she didn't know what to do.  The director said that was normal.  They were after all "abducted" and thrown into a hospital.  We all had to acknowledge that it is practically impossible to convince the patients that they were better off "here" than back at home.  We should never pretend "here" was "home".  If we let go and just listened to them and accepted their anger and grief, then the patient would eventually find his own way to convince himself about his own situation.

Again, my mother thought the director was looking down on the care worker who probably already knew all that and was still asking the director for his insight.  I could see that my mother had felt exactly the same as how I had felt towards the brain surgeon who talked about brain death and organ transplantation last month.

Maybe the director did look down on families.  After all, he was a pro at taking care of patients with mental problems while families were always amateurs struggling to accept the unacceptable -- the process of losing someone they love -- and trying to take care of them while dealing with other problems in life; of course they were not going to be perfect, they were going to be inconsiderate towards the patient at times.  But as my mother said, that doesn't mean the doctor can just sit back and give them a lecture like he knows everything.

When I said I didn't really think the director was that high-handed and added that it might have been because I was the same kind of human, I didn't really mean it, but my mother said maybe I was right.  "You're too good at everything."

I don't know what she really meant, but I hope I can become a doctor who can understand the pain of both the patient and his family.