Anonymous Doctor

Three post requests from the comments-- I'll knock them all out right now while I wait for my attending to show up (she's having "car trouble," which may or may not mean her alarm clock didn't go off this morning). [See, in most jobs, you can be late -- especially if you're the boss -- and it's not really something that going to cause someone else's entire day to get messed up. But here, you're late and that means I could have gotten up later and gotten an actual night's worth of sleep, plus we're going to start the day later which means we're going to end later which means I'm going to miss sleep on the other end. So if you're my attending, and you're late, while for you it's no big deal, for me it's a huge aggravation and I want to murder you.]

"Describe a colleague who seems to thrive on this stuff, and what you think is wrong with them."

Okay, I dispute the premise of this question. I don't think I have any colleagues who *actually* thrive on this stuff. I have colleagues who think they do, who think they're awesome and are in fact racing through their to-do lists and leaving a lot of important things unchecked, failing to follow up, failing to call the proper consults, failing to really serve their patients in the best possible way. I do it too, absolutely-- there are things that somehow never make it onto my list and then they don't get done until I happen to remember hours later, or someone else happens to ask-- fortunately nothing with any consequences, at least not yet, but for anyone reasonably responsible, the worry is there, the worry that you're missing something. And for the people who don't have that worry-- who "seem to thrive"-- they're almost certainly only thriving in their own heads and not in the heads of the colleagues who have to clean up their messes. There is too much to potentially do for each patient that you simply can't not get overwhelmed sometimes. You are missing something if you are always on top of everything, every hour of the day. That's all there is to it. So the people who seem to thrive are deluded. Period.

"Who's your wackiest coworker?"

Wacky?? This isn't a sitcom. I wish I had wacky co-workers. And maybe at 40 hours a week, some of these people would be wacky. At eighty hours a week, you're either extremely competent or you're extremely frustrating. And if you mean wacky in their personal lives, I don't know that anyone has time to be. I have a co-resident who gets crushes on half the PAs and techs we deal with, and I guess that makes her wacky, or insane, or desperate, or something like that. I've had a couple of interns who were thinking of dropping out and doing something else with their lives-- wasting the past 4+ years of education-- which would be pretty wacky. And there's a guy who wears suspenders. Which seems pretty wacky to me.

"Got any good med school stories?"

Nope. Med school sucked and I hated everyone there. And I probably should have blogged about it, but I didn't, so all of those stories are lost to the universe. Okay, I'm being glib here. I'm sure I have some good med school stories, but I can't think of any of them as I stand here in the only part of this unit I can get decent phone reception and write this. I'll put the question on the back burner and see what I can come up with.