Confidentiality Revisited

It's tough, you know. However hard I try, whatever I do to maintain confidentiality, events continue to conspire against me. People know people. My community is small, and my patients have family. Family have friends. And the friends read my blog. No matter what I do to try and change the facts, the facts are still there, in some form or other. And that means I am taking a risk, every time I write. For every one of you who lives so far away that the stories are just stories, there is another of you for whom these stories are ever so real.

And what does it matter? Well, I try so hard to include only enough reality to make the stories real to you, Constant Reader. I ensure that any medical information is couched in such terms as to negate the breach of confidentiality that these tales perform.

But, what if it were your kith or kin that were written about? What if you knew that what was written was at best inaccurate, and at worst a fabrication, would that matter to you? I am, on occasions, a little irreverent. How might it feel to you, reading that, at least I had gained a pair of scissors while attending to your loved one, injured so badly in a car accident that he lies between life and death on a hospital bed?

I don't know the answers to these questions. Maybe soon I will. Maybe the family of the lady I wrote about in "Scissors" will tell me. And, maybe, their words will bring this blog to an end.

You see, I write how I feel. And I cannot change the way I feel. Without the humour, the irreverence, I would not be able to cope with the endless sea of nameless faces.

To all of you out there, to all the families of those I have saved and those I haven't; please forgive my breaches, my fabrications and my irreverence. The patient is always first and uppermost in my mind, both at the roadside and at the keyboard. If you cannot forgive, then please try to understand.