Forgetting is hard

Remembering is worse

I said NO!! But he insisted anyway

I can still feel his touches

I can still see the shadow of a man standing in front of me

Every time I hear a deep voice at the back of mind

“I say it’s him”

Every time a shadow of a man standing next to me

“I sweat, shake, and remember the day he touched me”

Forgetting is hard, but remembering is worse!!

They said forgive and forget,

But they know nothing for they never experience what I’ve been through

How can one forget, when the perpetrators are still out there

…

“I hate to say this to your face BUT I HATE MEN”

This piece of poem is constructed based on the words used by the patient I was treating on my NMS block. Silverman (2015) stated that sexual harassment thoughts hunts the individual as long as she lives. Furthermore, in this poem the patient clearly states her feelings and showed that she does not trust men. She illustrates how she feels being around a male and moreover being touched by the male.

This happened on my NMS clinical block, when a 27-year-old came to the department complaining of back pain and since I had an open space to take patient at that time, I decided to see her. During the session she was awkward, I did not pay much attention to her mood during subjective assessment, although, I could tell that something was not right. Then I had to move to objective assignment and was somewhat annoyed with the way she was responding to my subjective assessment, thus wanted to get over the objective and be done with her. During objective she could follow my commands on doing active movements, the problem started when I asked her to take off the top and lay on her tummy. I noticed that she was not comfortable with that, but I did not pay much attention thinking that is “normal”. When I touched her back, she squeezed her body and moved away from my hands, and I responded with a smile thinking that she is moving away because my hands were cold. When I continued with palpitation, she squeezed her body while I was begging her to relax and be comfortable. Therefore, I asked if I should stop what I was doing as I was annoyed by this, and could not understand why she was doing that, but she answered with a crying voice “continue”. That is when I realized that it was not just her attitude and that there was something seriously wrong.

At this point I stopped and asked the patient to sit, while sitting she literally dropped. I was now not “annoyed” but scared. When I asked what is wrong, she responded with “I hate men”. Even though I was thinking that she was rapped hence she says that, I asked “why”, and she opened-up for me using the words in the above poem. At this time, I was feeling bad as I thought I was not professional enough with the patient. I did not show understanding from the beginning but was annoyed instead. She closed with the words “sorry to bring this up… this is my first time opening-up to a man”.

This incident made me realize a few things regarding clinical practice as student physiotherapists. Meeting different patients and that is all they are “patients” and we end up treating them as one object. We unintentionally think that the patients are the same and thus should respond in a similar way during the sessions (Ferreira et al., 2012) . We only ask the patient how they are feeling with regard to the structure of the body we are treating instead of the patient as a whole. This has made me try to understand the patient and how they feel as this will prompt empathy and effective approach to treatment (Kelley, Kraft-Todd, Schapira, Kossowsky & Riess, 2014).

Reference list

Ferreira, P., Ferreira, M., Maher, C., Refshauge, K., Latimer, J., & Adams, R. (2012). The Therapeutic Alliance Between Clinicians and Patients Predicts Outcome in Chronic Low Back Pain. Physical Therapy, 93(4), 470-478. doi: 10.2522/ptj.20120137

Kelley, J., Kraft-Todd, G., Schapira, L., Kossowsky, J., & Riess, H. (2014). The Influence of the Patient-Clinician Relationship on Healthcare Outcomes: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials. Plos ONE, 9(4), e94207. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0094207

Silverman, D. (2015). First do no more harm: Female rape victims and the male counselor. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 47(1), pp.91-96.