Unit 3Section 3Difficult Patients

There’s much chance in who we become. A little luck separates us by small margins from other possibilities, marking the difference between a rotten past and a merely traumatized one. At least that’s how I explain the problems I had with one of my most difficult patients, Margaret May. Though she never specifically spoke of her childhood, she lived it and walked it. Like Prometheus, perpetually recycling the self, she was still trying to redo it. I wanted to tell her the demons she had grown up with were leaving their prints all over her present life, that she needed to find another way to redeem and rescue her damaged self.

The purpose of this section is to understand what specific patient behaviors and characteristics physicians tend to label as difficult and how to reframe potentially frustrating encounters in a positive manner