insensitive technicians a friend was recently admitted to north carolina memorial hospital because of suspected meningitis serious business they wanted to do a lumbar puncture for which a ct scan is a prerequisite i arrived in her hospital room about an hour after she had returned from the ct she was in tears evidently the technicians in the ct lab had been very unpleasant to her to begin with they put her on the apparatus that moves you into the machine itself and just pushed a button to slide her straight into the machine without any explanation imagine this you worried you may have a deadly disease and next thing you know you re being put into this big scary machine without a word of explanation about what is going to happen to you i believe this is inexcusable she waved her hand as if to say what are you doing to me and they responded with annoyance and anger next they inserted or tried to insert an iv catheter apparently she has a lot of trouble with these and complained of the pain the technician just stopped and fixed her with a glare without any words of explanation is there anything i can do about these pigs i realize that these technicians do this sort of job day in and day out and that some patients can be very irritating and uncooperative but this is simply no excuse their purpose for existing is to help sick people and there is no excuse for this sort of behavior fortunately my friend is fine but i imagine a large proportion of the people who get ct scans are not fine at all they have cancer and that sort of thing they don t need this kind of shit also since i named the hospital involved i should also point out that neither she nor i have any complaints about the competence or compassion of any of the other personnel at ncmh thanks for listening john eyles jge cs unc edu
