Motherhood

In one split second, my compassion turns into anger, my empathy into disdain.  All the negative feelings I should never feel towards patients swirl in my head.

We picked her up from home.  In the back of the ambulance, I carefully took her history.  She was 4 months pregnant, but was experiencing abdominal pain and had been bleeding for two hours.  She was crying.  I understood; she thought she was losing the baby, but it was way too early to know.  Despite the fact that she had been pregnant many times, had only one child, and had never had a spontaneous miscarriage, I reserved judgement, and pulled out all the stops.  I comforted her, reasoning with her that there was no cause to be upset until she knew what was going on, that she wasn't bleeding that much.  I even got her to smile, to slow her breathing and relax some.

So, when I see her outside the triage area of Women & Infants hospital ten minutes later smoking a cigarette, I want to run her over with the ambulance.  I want to scream into the PA "I know you weren't just crying about possibly losing your baby two minutes ago, only to be smoking a cigarette now."  She had told me it was a high-risk pregnancy because of her hypertension, and now I'm sure that her hypertension is due to her continual smoking or her obesity, both of which are within her control to stop.  

I don't mind taking care of people who can't take care of  themselves–they constitute 80% of my patients.  I don't really care if people smoke, either.  But to sob in the back of my ambulance, to make me care about what happens to your baby, and then show me how little you care about him yourself?  I hate her in that moment.