Talking About Your Symptoms

There will often be occasions where you are asked to describe your symptoms - pain, nausea, shortness of breath, or some other medical problem.  To do this efficiently is actually quite difficult!  Here are a few pointers that may help:

1. As you describe the medical problem, try to be as factual as you can. It's very easy to exaggerate the pain or nausea in order to convince the doctor. As a patient, one often feels that somehow this will produce better or more urgent therapy. You don't usually need to convince your doctor of either the severity of your symptoms or of your own personal courage.
2. Use your own language. Just because your doctors or nurses use medical jargon, you don't need to. There's nothing wrong with using your own words to describe the problem. In fact using jargon that you only partly understand might cause difficulties by giving the wrong slant to your problem. 
3. When you're embarrassed, don't hesitate to say so!  We all find certain kinds of medical symptoms and problems embarrassing and may not want to talk about them to someone else. So when you start talking about something that is embarrassing, just say so ("I'm sorry...this is embarrassing to talk about").

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