- As a doctor, do you pay enough attention to the person behind the patient?
- Do you dare say to your patient that you don’t know and will look into it further?
- Are you aware of your own prejudices and where they come from?
- Do you ever reflect on your own end of life?
Former general practitioner Jolien Plantinga reflects on these questions in My sensational body. She talks about her illness that prevents her from being able to practise her profession again.
Her erratic and poorly understood symptoms cause her to look at the doctor she has been with different eyes. She asks herself essential questions about what she has contributed in her professional life. Has she seen, heard, helped the person on the other side of the desk well enough?
In raw, pointed terms, she outlines the reality of surviving with a faltering body and failing head. Of the vulnerability this creates in contact with family, friends, doctors and healthcare providers. By necessity, she also asks herself the ultimate question: when is life still sufficiently worth living?
Jolien unites the perspective of doctor and patient in one person. Poignantly, she lets us see through her eyes as a doctor to the patient and as a patient to the doctor.
100% of the royalties go to Lyme research and education
From the book
“My being sick makes me look in the mirror. Who was I as a doctor? Did I say ‘I don’t know’ often enough? Did I dare to question medical science enough? Did I think outside the box enough? Did I listen to the other person’s experience without judgement? Not always.
While travelling through my memory in search of the doctor I was, I am reminded of a patient I visited after she was diagnosed with Lyme disease. She was lying on the sofa with an arm over her eyes to shield them from the light. The curtains were half-closed. I remember saying something like, ‘I’m shocked at how intense this is for you.’ Or: ‘I am shocked at how violently you are reacting to this.’ I hope I said the first, but fear it was the latter. And how was my tone? Was it mild? Or was I judging her? Was I trying to hold on to the my conveniently safe belief that Lyme is not that bad? However I brood, I don’t know the answer.”
Recommendations
Much to my regret, I don’t read many books, my energy actually always goes into other things and for relaxation reading is too strenuous. But this book I really wanted to read.
As a doctor and a patient, I recognised a lot of what Jolien writes. Your whole image of illness changes enormously when you are (suddenly) on the wrong side of the desk. Whereas as a doctor you sometimes tend to look mainly for a diagnosis and corresponding solutions, as a patient you look for someone to hear you and make life livable for you again. The symptoms Jolien describes are terrible. You sympathise with her as she tries to survive, somewhere between enduring despair, battling and learning to enjoy small things. From her new role as a patient, she reflects honestly on being a doctor and on medicine as a whole. There has always remained a lot of ambiguity around Lyme, but the book shows in clear language the huge consequences of this wretched disease.
I think this book will give a lot of recognition to patients with Lyme and similar diseases, and I hope it will also reach many healthcare providers. You often don’t really understand it until you experience it yourself, what a blessing if you can learn the lessons without having to experience it yourself. As a doctor, it is really not necessary to know everything, but be honest, curious and engaged, then you will go a long way.
– Marlies van Hemert, Physician non-practising at Understood Complaints
“This book should be mandatory reading for all doctors. The story is a plea for some ( extra) empathy, understanding and possibly even a push to think a little more ‘with’ rather than ‘about’ the patient.
Besides, for patients it is a ( sometimes painful sometimes funny) recognition of the harsh journey that many with chronic, not immediately clearly diagnosable, symptoms have to undertake. As a doctor with Long Covid symptoms, I only really realised during my own illness process, and the changing patient-doctor relationship, how doctors focus too much on results and tests, and listen too little to the knowledge and expertise of the patients themselves. This is articulated clearly and vividly by Jolien’s story.“
– Gitte Boumeester, Physician in training to become a psychiatrist
“What a moving , beautifully written book! Jolien describes how she experiences her illness, raw and honest. It makes me think about how I act as a doctor.“
– Karin Hoedemaker, GP in Whije
“Actually, I had planned to read this book slowly, bite by bite. But Jolien’s story took me away, made me want to read on and on. Living with her during the deep valleys, hoping along for improvement, for prospects, and perhaps most of all for recognition. She candidly shows how tough and lonely it can be in healthcare, when you suffer from an illness that is not well understood. That a doctor dares to say to you, ‘I know little about Lyme, but Lyme can’t be it.’
I have great admiration for Jolien’s bearing, for the way she has coped with her body and her spirit, how she can tell incredibly touching stories about it, and how she unerringly exposes where there are shortcomings in healthcare. As far as I am concerned, this book belongs on the list of indispensable books for doctors and other healthcare workers. So that we keep looking, keep listening, and keep questioning.“
– Marije Weidema, internal medicine intern, long-term recovery from concussion.
“With My sensational body, Jolien Plantinga has written a very personal and powerful book, about the tension that exists between systems, scientific insights and beliefs on the one hand and the human dimension, sincere attention and space for the not-knowing on the other. And in particular: the lack of the latter in the medical sector and its dire consequences for patients.
I hope that this book provokes thought and disruption, so that medical care (in our country) does not get bogged down in exclamation marks, but is lovingly shaped with (sometimes) a little more questioning and space for minority perspectives.“
— Frank Weijers, Deep Democracy instructor, proceskundige, auteur.
“There are those books
That you read in one go
This is (for me)
Not such a book
Occasionally put away
Intense – sometimes almost too Much
Confrontation – Recognition
As a doctor – Human
I take it again – Read more
To be continued – just like Life”
— Edward Knol, general practitioner
“An impressive story to read, what an impact such a Lyme infection has! Jolien very empathically describes how she experienced the despair, not feeling heard by medical specialists who just don’t admit they don’t know either. The loneliness in this is palpable and poignant. I hope it will be read by many people.”
— Jildou van Duijvendijk, general practitioner-practitioner Arnhem
From the book
I go to work and I take with me
My ID: A doctor’s bag
you know, one of those brown leather ones
The corners worn
A sliding lock on it
At the top
A stethoscope
Reflex hammer
Blood pressure gauge
Hidden underneath
My doubts and insecuritiesI go to work and I take with me
All my senses
To listen
Between the lines
Unconscious
Of unconscious biases,
assumptions
The great confidence
In what I have learnedI go to work and take with me:
My past
My present
And my dreams for the futureI go to work and take with me
Myself
As a doctor
As a human being