The Anxious Mother
She arrives at A&E and tells you her child isn’t right. The breathing is wrong.
The child looks fine. Observations are normal. You send them home.
Anxious mother.
The next morning she’s at the GP. Obs fine again. A chest infection, probably. Here are some antibiotics. Go home.
Anxious mother.
She’s back at A&E that night. The child is running around the waiting room, playing. Chest infection, you say. Keep going with the antibiotics. We’ll discharge you as soon as the paperwork’s signed.
Anxious mother.
The child falls asleep. She keeps asking you to check again. Something is wrong, she says. Please. You’re polite, but you’re really just waiting on the discharge papers. The child is fine.
Anxious mother.
Now she’s becoming a problem. She’s insisting — loudly — that if you don’t come and check her child, her child is going to die. She’s making a scene. Other people are looking.
So, reluctantly, to settle her down more than anything, you go and check.
The child’s lungs have collapsed.
You rush them to resus.
That anxious mother just saved her child’s life. Because she saw something nobody else did.
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We didn’t just dismiss her. We came close to letting the very thing she was trying to prevent happen anyway.
The story we told about her almost cost her child.
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We tell stories about people all the time.
The anxious mother. The difficult patient. The overprotective parent. The manipulative teenager. The non-compliant child. The neglectful family.
Most of the time, we don’t even realise we are doing it. The story arrives so quickly that it feels like a fact.
But every story acts like a lens. Once we have decided what we are looking at, we start noticing the evidence that confirms it. The mother becomes more anxious. The child becomes more defiant. The family becomes more neglectful. The story strengthens itself — until something happens that forces us to see what was there all along.
Perhaps the most important question is not whether our stories are right or wrong. It is whether we hold them lightly enough to let them change.
Because sometimes the person in front of us knows something we don’t. Sometimes the behaviour we are trying to explain is information rather than evidence. And sometimes the story we are most certain about is the very thing preventing us from seeing clearly.
The next time someone refuses to let something go, perhaps the question is not:
“Why are they so anxious?”
But:
“What are they seeing that I can’t?”