It’s a normal Monday with my weekly Posture and Back care class. My clients look exhausted, yet they’re happy with the results we have achieved together through out the fall season. Its 5:50 pm, I yell out: “Last round, Finish strong!” I can see the relief on their faces when I started the countdown: “5, 4,3,2,1…. Time!” Every one rushes to their water bottles, and I start the cool down. I spend extra time on the stretching portion to bring on that “good feeling” of stretched muscles and a relaxed back. Towards the end, I realize that one of the members is not able to stand up from the mat. I get her seated on a chair and asked “what’s wrong? Do you need a sugar pill?” She informs me that sometimes her throat closes up and its difficult for air to go into her lungs, she assures me that she will be well again within minutes. So, until she gets better I decided to start a conversation to ease the time, and get her mind off the problem. As we’re talking, she mentions that she is a physician which gave me extra reassurance. In the duration of 30 minutes, she mentions twice that she is “better now”, but once she gets up, she cannot hold her weight and she sits down again. Now, she starts complaining of symptoms like low blood pressure, and feeling cold. I knew from previous experiences that these almost always indicate hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) which I already asked about multiple times but she was certain that it’s her airways. After 45 minutes of no improvement of the situation, I insist that she should consider a sugar pill just in case. She responds by saying “maybe it is the sugar, I have not eaten since 8am!” At this point, I felt the frustration creeping in. This hour I spent with her was rather stressful. I questioned the difficulty of my class: “did I push them too hard?” I was also feeling guilty for her health deterioration, and I was losing confidence in my ability to do my job. I was also feeling some fear for my future, considering that I want to pursue a career in health care; so you can imagine that this situation is not exactly a good sign for my long term goals. Going back to the situation at hand, once I understood her status, I insisted that she takes a dextrose pill (sugar), and she took one and we finally saw some improvement and she went home.

I guess on most cases the most accurate description of a person’s status can come from a person himself. But sometimes, people’s judgement is clouded and the person responsible of the situation has to make a judgement call regardless of how qualified the client/patient/student at hand is. The experience I just described was not a pleasant one, yet I learned an important lesson: a person’s words are not always the best reference to rely on to make a decision.