sure life is an unfair world

one of our emergency nurse is being admitted due to pneumonia. she had fever for more than a week, cough crazily for about a week and she already had a blood count done, and the result came back normal. but she still had fever up until today. she got the night duty yesterday, and at the end of her shift, the doctor in charge suggested to her to get an X-ray, and the result is pretty shocking for me. she got pneumonia.

she's 25 years old, same age as me, still single and underweight (based on her appearance). she worked her ass off in the ER and she worked really hard. multiple overtime, crazy ambulance tasks, and God knows what else she has been dealing with in our ER. and now, she's sick. pneumonia...oh gosh..that's something you can catch from patients that came to ER. but that's scarier than just upper respiratory tract infection.

and it got me thinking. as a medical provider, we're at risk of catching something from our patients. unfortunately, here, we don't get the protection that we need. there are a lot of rules and conditions before our company paid our expenses. and hell with the universal precautions. here in indonesia, even though all the international-labelled hospital already tried to do the best they can to practice the universal precaution as standard procedure, unfortunately, there were holes and cheats here and there. no one here in indonesia that do the universal precaution 100 % as standard procedure. it's different from abroad where everyone is so strict about it. they are so afraid of spreading infections and stuff. and don't forget the patients.

patients here clueless about what they could do to us. they forgot that we're also human, that we can be sick too. that we can be infected from anything that they had the moment they came into our ER. the moment we treated them. the moment they withhold important informations from us. patients abroad very meticulous about their complaints. they listed their complaints and problems. any previous history they told us all. they understood that anything could affect our judgements if they withheld some informations.

but here? we, as doctors and nurses, are required to be semi mind-reader and fortune teller. we need to have the ability to scan the diagnosis out of the patients just by watching them from head to toe as they might not reveal everything. and we have to play some tricks in order to get all the right informations from them. and the most dangerous part is, here, we have more HIV cases every year. it's getting nearer to our home. but since it's taboo to reveal that you have HIV, some patients just withhold that important information from us just because they're embarrassed about it. which is sucks.

me, myself, am a sloppy person. i got bruises and scratches and cuts here and there. i bumped into things more than anyone else. i got cut from nearly everything. i'm at chance of having micro cuts that i might forget, that i might not know i'm having it, that i might not feel when i got it. which means i'm at risk of fluid exchange if i didn't wear gloves or goggles or anything else written in the universal precaution' procedure. which means, damn...i might get infected if i still being reckless. *sigh*

it's hard to become a health provider. we offered our help to help others. we're at risk everyday. we seldom get the gratitude from those that we've helped. we often get complaints from simple mistakes that any human could do. and we get minimum protection from our company. sure life is an unfair world.