Thank you for advocating for patients. Multiple physicians refused to run any tests for severe pain I was having, labeling me “drug-seeking” when I had no history of the sort (and even if I did, like??? I was vomiting because it was so bad). Anyway, turns out there was an aneurysmal bone cyst compressing my spinal cord at my T8 —to quote my surgeon—to the point of injury. It actually destroyed my entire T8, and I needed a fusion, a support structure to replace the vertebra, and a bone graft. I’m permanently disabled now. I can still walk, which is a miracle, but I’ll be plagued by severe pain and other complications for the rest of my life (which I’ve also been labeled as drug-seeking for, even though I’ve had to drop out of college and come home because I can’t manage my studies—which were, ironically, medicine-related). ...At least I got some fun X Rays out of it?

Look, I have no idea how to resolve something like this, nor do I have the perspective necessary to even try, but I my heart goes out to you all. Patients need to be better-educated on what a physician can and cannot do, and physicians, I feel, need to listen. But I don’t have to tell you all what’s making things difficult. I’m so sorry that physicians and nurses and EMTs and other medical services are so overtaxed that situations like this are being overlooked just from severe overwork. The stress and burnout is palpable from the patient’s end (at least, I felt it), and when I was able to be at school and taking a course to become a CNA, I got a small glimpse of it from the other side. Not enough to form an opinion on what it’s like to you all, but enough to empathize, I think.

So, I have a few questions, if it’s not too much to ask: what can patients do to lessen the stress on medical care personnel? How can we better understand what your jobs are? What can we do to make things easier while you’re doing your jobs?

And how can we communicate better with you? I’m genuinely asking, because while my experiences are probably rare, they still illustrate a fundamental gap in the communications between medical care practitioners and their patients. There is something more we can be doing here. I realize that people slipping through the cracks is inevitable, and y’all are humans who make mistakes just like anybody else. I often feel as though some patients elevate people who work in medicine to an almost godly status, which screws the relationship because physicians are expected to have all the answers and a magic pill, and never ever make mistakes.

It’s a paradigm that’s not fair to anybody.