Questions and answers from Quora/Reddit that I find amusing or insightful.
**Copied directly from the post itself, so if there's typos I didn't make them.
**Some questions have multiple answers.
**A crap ton of posts from Ethan James because I love...
I've told this story before, but I'm sure many people out there have yet to read it. What happened to me is inexcusable, and it makes me mad to this day.
It was the Fall of 2012, and I was living in the small rural Pennsylvania town of Williamsport. I was receiving my medical care from the VA clinic there. The entire clinic was on the second floor of a medical office building and consisted of two doctors, a psychiatrist, and a physician assistant. Not very big.
You know how you get a bad feeling from certain people after you have just met them? This is how it was when I went to my new psychiatrist for the first time. She looked at me with what seemed to be contempt bordering on disgust.
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** This photo kind of reminds me of her.
During my first couple of visits, I let it slide because I thought maybe that was just the way she looked. It wasn't. She was mean and judgemental. I can certainly handle dealing with that kind of personality, but those are not qualities I want to see in a doctor caring for me.
During my first visit, we went over my list of diagnoses, one of which was ADD. I don't want to get into it too much, but an Army psychiatrist gave me that diagnosis after a TBI. He was treating the symptoms with medication.
Without missing a beat, she looked up at me and said,
"You don't have ADD. I'm not giving you any more of that med."
Wow. She was with me for all of two minutes and made that clinical decision. I tried to explain about my TBI and how I was diagnosed with ADD secondary to that by two different military doctors. All that did was piss her off.
"You don't have ADD.," she grumped. "Let's move on."
We went on to cover anxiety, depression, and PTSD.
"I thought you guys never admitted to that.", she said, referring specifically to the PTSD.
"I'm retired now.", was all I had to say.
She said she was writing a couple of prescriptions for me and gestured towards the door. Apparently, my session was up.
During subsequent visits, I could tell she didn't like veterans much, and she had a particular disdain for men. Once, she asked me what I enjoyed. I told her that I liked to shoot, work out, and drive fast cars. She rolled her eyes and sighed.
"What the hell was that?" I thought to myself. Usually, I can charm people. I mean, I'm a reasonably likable guy who can get along with just about anyone. This lady didn't like me. That's fine, but she was my psychiatrist.
When I answered her questions, she'd look at me with her arms crossed and an expression on her face like she had just eaten something sour. She thought I was a bad person who had done bad things. She sat there in judgment.
Jump forward a few more months. My anxiety and agoraphobia weren't being well controlled, and I mentioned to her a med I used to take in the past that gave me good results.
She looked at me, and half laughed when she said, "I'm not giving you that med."
"Why not?" I shot back.
Instead of answering my question, she said, "It's all your fault, you know."
"What is?" I wondered.
"Your anxiety, your PTSD. What did you expect, given the life you chose?" This was a low blow. I reached out for some help, and she basically told me I had it coming.
She also told me that medicine wouldn't help me because my problems were all in my head.
That was it. Some button in my brain had just been pushed, and I was done with her.
I stood straight up out of my chair. She inched backward almost imperceptibly, and for a fraction of a second, she looked a little scared.
I told her that I thought she was a lousy doctor and that I wouldn't need her services any longer. That really pissed her off. She took it personally.
I got out of my seat and made my way past her to the door. She stopped me before I left, and she said. "I feel sorry for you. You deserve your misery."
I gave her half of a sarcastic smile as I walked out of her door.
"Nice try.", I said.
That last sentence of hers was just about as unprofessional as a psychiatrist can get, in my opinion. She was intentionally trying to piss me off. It didn't work.
I picked up a change of provider request form on my way out of the clinic, and it took the VA six months to get me another psychiatrist. The new doctor was over two and a half hours away, but I didn't mind. It was worth the drive to get the help I needed.
