How I'm unable to help doctors with my care

Jan. 18, 2018

Yesterday, I had a really bad fall. I went outside to clear the snow off my vehicle. Instead, I hit a patch of ice underneath the snow and I fell flat on my back! I laid there for a minute or two because I was in shock! I guess I forgot all about the ice that I had seen a few days ago. Now there were several inches of snow covering the ice in my driveway. The snow hid the ice from me and made it much slipperier! This is not what I needed to happen! I'm always so very careful so that I don't fall anymore, but somehow this just happened.

Numerous places on my body hurt! I was so sore that I could hardly move. Last night, my twenty-seven-year-old son took me to my primary care doctor's office. They sent me for x-rays on my tailbone and this morning I found out that it is just badly bruised and luckily not fractured.

Hours later, after I returned home to my apartment, I realized something. When I was being examined by the physician assistant, she was asking me all kinds of questions about my pain and where it hurt the most. I told her that my left knee and my tailbone hurt the most. I rolled up both pant legs so that she could see both knees. I told her that since I had a bad fall in April 2014, the left knee continues to be a problem. She asked me if my left knee was always that swollen and I replied “yes”. But in reality, in order for me to answer that question correctly, I need to be able to remember what my knee looked like before the fall. But with my short-term memory problems, that just isn't possible for me to do. I live alone, so there is no one here who can help me. I do remember putting pain gel on my knee after my shower yesterday morning. I think in some way, my knee might have been a little more swollen and the reason that I say that isn't because I can even remember how swollen it was, but after the fall, I had a hard time tolerating the pain. I usually have pain every day with my knee, but most of the time, I can tolerate it.

I'm not really sure how I can help medical staff take care of me when I can't even give them the correct information that they need in order to treat me. This is a problem, but I don't really know how to solve it. I really need to start taking a small notebook with me to my doctor appointments in case there is something that I need to write down. But in the case of not knowing how swollen my left knee was before the fall, I'm not sure what I can do to make that easier for me to accurately answer these questions.

The frustration for me is when medical professionals don't listen when I tell them how they need to accommodate my memory impairment.

I think that I might need to start taking a small notebook with me to my doctor’s appointments in case there is something important that I need to write down. I really don’t know how to better answer a question that compares things. I have a hard time answering these questions accurately because of my memory problems.