Professionalism

This is just a quick story about a patient encounter. Many if not most of the patients I saw on the largest Micronesian island of Weno had type 2 diabetes. This is largely a disease of obesity.



Now I am a healthcare provider and I’m a professional. If you come see me I will treat you with respect and do my best to provide quality care. But I am also a human being. To see woman after woman come up to my table all in varying degrees of obesity, and to have them laugh outright when I explain via translator that they need to lose weight was in some sense, well… comical. How outrageous that must have sounded to these island people coming from me.



One woman who must have weighed close to 400lbs approached my table. As with all those like her I had seen that day I wondered how the rented plastic lawn chair I had setup for patients could possibly hold her. Well, this time it didn’t.



About 30 seconds in to the encounter the chair made a loud cracking sound and the legs broke. Everyone in the room stopped to watch the woman fall (rather gently) to the ground with the crumpled chair beneath her. Someone later likened the scene to when Disney’s Bambi ventures out onto the ice, loses his balance, and his legs all go out in different directions.



I did my best not to laugh, helped the woman up, and gave her a new sturdier seat. But hey professional or not, let’s face it that was pretty damn funny.


--pete