My country rotation as a medical student was overshadowed by a heated argument between the general practitioner and his wife. She was sacrificing her life in this “hole of a place” and angrily stormed out to visit her children in boarding school in the city. Decades later, I now understand the frustration and challenges of rural general practice for a doctor, who is also a mother:
Being ignored in the street by the sister of someone I reported for child abuse. Remaining professional when my child was victimized at school by one of my young patients. Being called out to a cardiac arrest in the middle of lunch with best friends, and leaving them to babysit my children. A knock at the door at 2 a.m. by a tearful, teenage boy, who requested the morning after pill for his girlfriend, as the condom broke twenty minutes before, and “her father would kill him.” Listening to my baby screaming for a breastfeeding while I was resuscitating a choking child, who was rushed to my home by his frantic parents. Having my supermarket shopping prolonged by a patient who asked my advice about his hemorrhoids. Taking my children on a long-awaited outing and stopping at a motor car accident, where instead they were entertained by fire engines, police, ambulance and a helicopter unsupervised in the back of my car. Stopping at the next accident and praying we wouldn’t know the family this time. Un-bandaging my neighbor’s hand at my kitchen table at 11 p.m. and finding that he amputated his finger when he fell off the haystack that morning (“Well who else was going to milk the cows?”). Trying desperately and unsuccessfully to resuscitate a teenage boy after an accident in the main street in front of his mother. And having to counsel a community’s grief when I felt I couldn’t contain my own.
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