You go in for a procedure that will give you some relief from the chronic pain you’ve been cursed with. You voice a complaint to the medical receptionist. The receptionist in turn says to the tech who will check your blood pressure, “Watch out, this one is crazy.” Perhaps you voice another complaint to the tech. The tech chimes in to the nurse, “This one is a real pain in the ass.” By the time the nurse sees you, she has formed an idea of who you are, and responds accordingly.

The patient asks for an extra pillow to place between her legs. She has chronic leg pain and the extra pillow really helps.

The nurse says, “No.”

“Why not just get her the pillow?” I ask.

“You’ve seen her. She’s crazy. If you give her one thing, she’ll ask for another.”

This really happened. At a pain treatment center.

Now I’m not denying that there are difficult patients, and patients who will run you ragged if you let them. As a nurse you definitely need to set limits. But when you are seeing patients in a pain treatment center, I think you need to revise your way of thinking a little bit. This patient, who I will admit was quite difficult, said to me, “You know, I wasn’t always like this. Once this pain started in my life it just changed me completely.”

So I paid a little extra attention to her. I helped her get dressed. I helped her walk out after the procedure was done. Some might say that I fell into her trap of “good nurse/bad nurse.” But you know what? I don’t really care. The nurse who refused to get her a pillow said to me, “You don’t understand, we get some real crazies in here.” I said, “Look. I haven’t been working that much lately so I probably have a higher tolerance for the ‘crazies.’ Send them my way and I’ll be glad to take care of them.”

That pain treatment center is really starting to grow on me though. For every “crazy” patient that they see, there are five more that come out of their procedure with big smiles on their faces, knowing that their pain level just went from an 8/10 to a zero.