Exhaustification

I'm rooted!  This week we've been doing quite a lot of role-plays to practise our GP consulting skills.  I've done one each day since people generally seem reluctant to get involved and I typically don't mind looking like an idiot since I'm accustomed to it.

The first day was really easy, I just had to run through a simple screening interview for smoking, nutrition, alcohol and exercise with a patient.  Not much to it, although I had to kind of make it up as I went along since I had no idea what I was really supposed to be doing.  Fortunately this blog is excellent practise for that kind of improvisation.

The second day was gruelling.  My task was to inform a patient that her biopsy results had come back and that she had breast cancer.  As an aside, the patients are all played by professional actors and they do an incredible job.  This woman was aghast and started crying.  By the end of the consult I had forgotten that I was doing it in front of the rest of the class, and I was on the verge of tears myself.  When I was talking to the class afterwards about how I thought it had gone, my voice was all tense and wobbly. 

It was incredibly emotionally draining.  I probably could have done with some counselling myself, since I couldn't help personalizing the whole thing and thinking of friends and relatives who have had cancer.  It seemed so real.  I'm glad I volunteered for it though, since it's only a matter of time before I have to do it for real.  I'm not sure that there is much of way that it could be done "well" but I'm quite certain that there are a whole lot of ways to do it awfully.

And today I got to run a consult with a woman who was the victim of domestic violence.  That was not so personal for me but that also made it harder in a way because I had less of an intuitive sense of what would be the right thing to say.  It was no less exhausting than the yesterday's session though, and produced a similar feeling that the rest of the world just faded away.  The tutor cut us off a couple of minutes early because it was the last session of the day and I felt all outraged and wanted to say, "But what about this poor woman, she needs more help!"

The strangest thing about it was that it was the same actor playing the breast cancer sufferer and the domestic violence victim in both cases.  I feel like I've gone through this intense emotional bonding with her and that we know each other so well, but it's not so of course since we were both just pretending.  Neurologists tell us though that imagining a situation is almost as useful when practising as actually doing it in real life, and pretending to experience emotions is almost as powerful as actually experiencing them.

No wonder Hollywood is so messed up.  Where's my limo???