An encounter I had this week was with a different frequenting patient to our office. He was a 24-year-old African American male with a history of chronic gastritis, peptic ulcer, and gastrointestinal reflux disease. He came to our office with symptoms of acute abdominal pain. During the physical examination, it became obvious to me that the patient was hiding something. I pointed out that the patient was not being complete honest and stated that I would not be able to help if he did not tell me the truth about what was wrong. As I discovered, the patient was homosexual and the pain was the result of him stuffing a sex toy too far up his rectum, to the point he could no longer reach it. The patient was hospitalized, as there was a good chance of intestinal perforation (Robertson, 2017).
I was able to resolve this case due to my strong work ethic, the desire to help the patient, and non-judgmental attitude. This was important, as without these qualities I would not have been able to extract the information out of the patient and provide qualified assistance (Thomas et al., 2017). Although the case was rather unusual, my purpose as a nurse was to provide relief rather than make judgments about the patient’s personal and moral qualities. This encounter helped me further my goals of providing quality aid to patients and learn to recognize non-verbal clues and signs of distress (Buppert, 2018). Had I not picked up the psychological uneasiness about the condition, it would have resulted in unnecessary delays in the diagnosis, which could have endangered the patient’s well-being and resulted in intestinal perforation.
References
Buppert, C. (2018). Nurse practitioner’s business practice and legal guide (6th ed.). Sudbury, MA: Bartlett & Jones Learning.
Robertson, W. J. (2017). ‘Believe it or not’: The medical framing of rectal foreign bodies. Culture, Health & Sexuality, 19(8), 815-828.
Thomas, A. C., Crabtree, M. K., Delaney, K. R., Dumas, M. A., Kleinpell, R., Logsdon, M. C., … Nativio, D. G. (2012). Nurse practitioner core competencies. Web.