Pain Mismanagement

| navy | medicine |

As a corpsman in a dermatology clinic our sole purpose is to make sure that our patients are as comfortable as possible. The number one priority at all times during the course of the work day is our patient. If we can not make our patients comfortable than we have failed.

I went into a room today for a routine punch biopsy. It was on the fingers which is usually a pretty sensitive area. This patient was completely terrified at the idea of me coming any where near him with the anesthesia. After doing a bit of research I come to find out that the last time he had this procedure done the corpsman that was working with him gave him one tiny little dose of lidocaine and then proceeded to do the procedure. The patient felt every bit of the procedure.

That corpsman failed. I don’t know who it was and quite frankly it does not matter. It could have been any of us. Lidocaine hurts like hell when you are injecting a patient. What is the point of them enduring that pain if they have to feel the pain from the biopsy as well.

At the end of the procedure the patient told me that I did a great job. He said “I don’t know what you did differently but I didn’t feel a thing.” I did not do anything special. Just my job. Local anesthesia is not an art form. All it takes is a little bit of compassion. Place yourself in the shoes of the patient. Wouldn’t you want to feel the least amount of pain as physically possible?

Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.

Check out some more stuff to read down below.

Most popular posts this month

Recent Favorite Blog Posts

This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.

Articles from blogs I follow around the net

[RIDGELINE] Eras

Ridgeline subscribers — I like “eras.” That is, named chunks of time. Japanese history tends to periodicize based on locus of power. The Tokugawa Shogunate reigned for hundreds of years, and so: Edo, where the power was, becomes the period (a big sweeping o…

via Craig Mod — Writer + Photographer January 24, 2026

Wilson Lin on FastRender: a browser built by thousands of parallel agents

Last week Cursor published Scaling long-running autonomous coding, an article describing their research efforts into coordinating large numbers of autonomous coding agents. One of the projects mentioned in the article was FastRender, a web browser they bu…

via Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries January 23, 2026

Back to Basics

Site updates I’ve decided to further consolidate and simplify some of the functionality as I continue to centralize my web presence. I don’t really post on social media, and as of late I am greatly cutting back my media consumption and replacing it with re…

via Scott Knight's Blog January 23, 2026

Generated by openring