SoP

I went into the urodynamics procedure, where they try to work out the reasons why people get urine incontinence. They have various pressure transducers (to work out bladder pressure) and in the process, slowly fill up the bladder with fluid to see what happens, all in the meantime occasionally using Xray imaging to view the outline and filling. At various times, the patient is also asked what they experience, going from a sensation that they could go, to a sensation that there is liquid or fullness there, to feeling full, to being on the point that they really really need to go now. Well, the lady I saw finally got to the last stage, and we could see that her bladder was pretty full on the monitors. At this point, the doctor then asked that she stop holding on and let go (she had an absorbent pad on and around her), but after saying a few times that she really really felt the need to go, she couldn't. We all waited around for a while, but nothing happened. All the while, I watched the little monitor, measuring the volume, go up and up, as the bladder filled up more and more. Still nothing. There was various attempts of coaxing and encouragement from the doctors, including having a running tap in the background, as well dunking her hand in cold water (this was definitely having an effect on me). We finally gave up, gave her a little bell, told her to ring us after she had finished, and then left the room. The bell rang a minute later.

Apparently the woman had had a case of stage fright (quite common actually), and could only finally go after we had. Though I'm not sure that I would have had the same problem, it'd be interesting to find out whether I can save myself some embarassment next time I'm busting to go by imagining that everyone was looking at me and expecting me to go.

I've lately come up with a system of indicating how strongly I feel for a particular situation. I've always had the problem (with some people more than others) where there's a decision to be made, and both I and the other person are or seem ambivalent about what to do. We end up standing around going 'well, whatever you think' or some such and nothing gets done. So, I came up with clarifying how much I preferred a particular option by specifying afterwards how much I cared. For example, if i didn't particularly care where we went for lunch, then I might go 'Lets go to Shanghai Dumpling (again), my strength of preference is 2 (over going to Hungry Jacks (again))', whereas the other person might roll their eyes and reply that they had been to Shanghai Dumpling too many times in the last week. Of course, stating my preference in sentence after every decision might become tedious, and so I shortened it to 'sop' (strength of preference), followed by a number, which represents on a numerical scale how much I preferred one to the other. Imagine a spectrum, with SD 10 on one end, and HJ 10 on the other, for example, with a midpoint of ambivalence (0) in the middle. Well, that's how I imagined it. I'm hoping that in the future this might make certain decision making processes much more efficient if we can communicate our ideas and preferences without so much fiddling with words and expressions.