Honey honey

Good morning! It’s another bright Saturday at Disability Physicals – today’s forecast is showing chronic pain with a chance for neuropathy. I hope everyone is able to get some rest over this holiday weekend, because next week promises to be a doozey in disability land. Thanks to the genies at social security, we’re totally full for the first two weeks of June, which is nice. Anyway, on to the blog!

I pulled up to the building this morning around 7:30 AM. A little early, I know, but we’re training a new physician today, and I like to go over some of the “ins and outs” of the exam with them before they face the onslaught. As I was putting my key into the door, a 19ghetto Chevy zooms up behind me, and a toothless woman with I-just-stuck-my-finger-into-a-light-socket hair leans out of the window and yells, “is this the place for my boytoy’s disability thingie?”
“Well,” I responded, “it could be, who are you here to see?”
“Some doctor or something, I can’t pronounce his or her name. It’s like xxxxx.”
Now, without revealing my secret identity, I’ll just let you know that my name is really not that hard to pronounce…I’m of Gaelic heritage, it’s not like I have eight consonants in a row or something (no offense to people with eight consonants in a row). For some reason, however, people have a really difficult time spelling or pronouncing it – maybe I should change it to Dwayne Wayne or something. Anyway, I responded to the banshee with “that’s me, let me just open up the building.”
“Oh that’s ok, honey,” she replied, “we still gotta drink our coffee, so it’ll be a bit.”

Argh, big pet peeve. I really don’t like being called “honey” by patients. For that matter, I don’t like it when other doctors call their patients honey, but that’s another story. Anyway, 40 minutes later, they walked in the door…I guess it was a big cup of coffee. The boytoy’s complaint was that “my back hurts all the time – it’s like a 2 on a 0-10 scale.” When questioned how that pain kept him from working, he responded, “Well, it makes me forget things all the time, like where my wrench is, or what I’m doing. I just can’t function on that level of pain, and all the Lortab my doctor is giving me isn’t helping anymore.”

Have you ever wanted to just tell someone to tough it up? I mean, I understand that pain can be debilitating – heck, almost every person I see doing these physicals tells me how debilitating it is. But a 2? Really? Anyway, he started crying through the physical exam…after I told him that he was going to have to bend at the waist. Apparently the thought of bending was too much for him to handle. I have to say, however, he bent…about 10 degrees, and then begged me to “make the pain stoooooooooppppp!” Well, it did after he stood up, and wouldn’t you know, he didn’t seem to be in all that much pain after I watched him run to get into his care after the exam. Go figure.

And now for the disability quote of the day:

Me: “Have you ever held a job?
Dude: “I worked at Little Caesar’s for three days, but they fired me because I cooked too many square pizzas.”
Me: “….ok then.”

Have a good one, honey.
-DD