the art of breaking bad news

As of Sunday I've been a Massachusetts Dept of Public Health certified HIV counselor and tester, which was pretty gratifying after nearly 2.5 full days of training. It was a long process, but mostly fun (talking about sex in an academic setting is always awesome, right?). Over the next few weeks we're going to do some shadowing on the wards with current counselors/testers and then we'll be cleared to do the counseling and testing by ourselves.

We did some role-playing at the end of the day yesterday, and I was to deliver a positive HIV test result to my "client," who was being acted out by a girl in my class. It was definitely one of the hardest things I've ever had to say to anyone, and it wasn't even a real situation....

It could have gone a lot worse (this girl in my class didn't ham it up and go over the top with grief; actually, if anything, she was pretty muted in her response), but it was still a terrible scenario that I hope I'll never encounter in real life. Apparently one of the 2nd year counselors has gotten FOUR HIV-reactive test results since he started volunteering last year. I can't even imagine that.

It's experiences like this that make me think that medicine is more about knowing how to talk to people and deliver bad news than finding a cure. That's more along the philosophy of the "Healer's Art" class that I'm taking as an elective for this semester. I'm a little skeptical of the class, but more on that in the next post since I really need to go practice for VagMo, unless I want to look like a complete fool on stage tomorrow.