If the shoe fits

If newFNP didn't have photographic documentation of herself salsa dancing and Corona-drinking in a far-far-away city a mere five evenings ago, she would swear that she had been trapped in her urban community health clinic Gulag for ages.

NewFNP wants to storm into the packed waiting room and scream: People! Let's band together and stop this nonsense! You have a cold? Go home! You have diabetes and ate a doughnut, a tamale and a double mocha frappuccino before your appointment? You're fired!

And those would be the easy cases. Today, newFNP's cases were not so.

Influenza? Check.

Child sexual abuse? Check.

Crying overweight ladies (plural) who don't want to have sex with their husbands? Check. (Prayer - please, please, please do not let newFNP ever fall into this group!!)

Parent who cannot name her child's apparently chronic, perhaps genetic, illness? Check.

NewFNP is not a parent, but if she were, she is pretty sure that if her child had some inborn error of metabolism or some genetic defect, she would at the very least have the wherewithal to write down the name of the fucking thing on a sticky pad. This would hold true even if newFNP were not an FNP. If newFNP were a fancy nail salon girl or a go-go dancer or even a rodeo clown, she would know enough to learn the name of the condition. Even more so if she herself had undergone genetic testing and had some genetic-something or other, as her patient's mom had.

When one spends nine years in post-secondary education, one's bar for normal intelligence is so absurdly skewed. Friends, newFNP is living 'regression to the mean' and this lady was at least two standard deviations below! NewFNP thought that everyone was like herself and her super-education friends.

Wrong. Oh sweet Lord, how wrong she was.

NewFNP hates to just chalk it up to 'stupid,' but sometimes the shoe fits. Can newFNP write "Mom not so bright" in the progress note? It only seems fair to give the next provider fair warning.