Pages tagged "Healthcare"

Friends Everywhere: In the last few months, there have been many notices of ill Friends on various lists, and the responses of other Friends have raised a concern for me. What is the appropriate detail of medical information to be shared on an email list about a member or attender at Meeting? I know that some Friends participate in various aspects of hospice, and they could share from their professional roles to help those of us on the sidelines understand where our role as members of Meeting for “holding in the light” is getting into the area of private information and where our advice, especially on open email lists, is not appropriate.

She suffered with an anxiety disorder as well as hard-to-explain, intermittent physical symptoms that seemed confined to one side of her body. Through multiple office visits, our comfort with each other grew, and her insightfulness and willingness to engage in therapy became apparent. Careful probing about her hyper-vigilance and avoidance behaviors led to an amazing revelation – a childhood incident in which she had disobeyed her parents and had been slightly injured on one side. The physical damage was minimal, but the emotional damage had manifested all these years later as one-sided pain and a specific fear of roadways and driving.

Johnny has spent the last fifteen minutes telling me about the count of the sausages he had in the freezer. He can’t quite account for four of them, and he keeps going over and over the possibilities of the sausage disappearance. This conversation seems just about to end, when he realizes that he might be able to get more when they are on sale. After agonizing over the sausages, he considers his corn dogs. They got defrosted by accident. He could not find them in the freezer.

Written by Peri Muldofsky