Empathy

Now, I'm not saying I look forward to being sick but falling ill is sometimes a golden opportunity for us healthcare professionals to be guinea pigs for the medicines that we dispense every single day. It started 2 weeks ago with a sore throat, fever and the sniffles before it morphed itself into a very irritating cough. The cough started to improve last week and could have been completely gone - if only I had resisted the temptation to indulge in some ice cream ('some' being the key word here).

With only less than a week to CNY festivities, I needed to get well ASAP. Desperate times calls for desperate measures as they say.

Being in a trance-like disoriented state for the past few days was a small price to pay in this instance as I have yet to cough today.

There is another plus side to being sick and it is that we can genuinely feel what our customers are feeling when they complain of having coughed their lungs out for 2 weeks. There is something very therapeutic there when the patient sees that we understand and respond empathically to their symptoms and quite a number have expressed their gratefulness.

All in all, its a relief to get the cough over with. I do hope I will never have to empathize with any of my Viagra customers.