Tales From Intern Year: Clueless

There is a med student who is rotating in neurology right now. Med students on our unit are generally super annoying because the unit is already super crowded. I've been brought to the brink of tears more than once because there was nowhere for me to sit and write notes/dictate.

So med students are not actually doing a job and they're basically just uselessly taking up space. Therefore, they annoy me.

A few days ago, I really wanted to strangle the med student though. He's been rotating with us for like a month, long enough to know how crowded it is. Yet he somehow thought it was a good idea to use the one of our only three seats as a place for him to study in the afternoon. This was studying he could have easily done ANYWHERE ELSE, including the cafeteria or his home or wherever. He was totally oblivious to the glares of all the nurses who had to stand as they did their charting.

I didn't say anything. Mostly because I was hoping someone tougher than me might tell him off and make him cry. That didn't happen though.

EDIT: Just to be clear, he wasn't MY med student. I didn't even know his name, since nobody ever bothered to introduce us.

It reminded me of a story from my intern year ER rotation, of the most clueless pre-med EVER:

His name was Jim (not his real name) and he was a college student following my ER attending during her shift. There were a lot of pre-meds shadowing attendings that month, and usually they were proficient in translating some foreign language and thus pretty helpful. But Jim was really clueless.

I had a patient who was actively miscarrying, passing huge grapefruit-sized blood clots. My attending was going to go into the room to do the pelvic exam and transvaginal ultrasound and Jim followed us in. I guess he was just trying to be helpful, but I think if you're a male it's appropriate to ask permission first before you walk into a room where a woman has her legs spread. I took him aside and said very nicely, "A lot of women feel uncomfortable having a male observe a pelvic exam, especially in this sensitive situation. I'd like to ask her first."

Jim replied, "But I have to follow the attending. I'll just stand at the other side of the room."

The room was about the size of the bathroom in my apartment and there were already too many people in the room. Instead of arguing further, I said to the woman, "Is it all right if this gentleman stays in the room."

She said it was OK, so I didn't make a big deal of it. He was, by the way, totally unhelpful during the exam because he couldn't find a freakin thing we asked him for. But whatever.

Later on, GYN came to do a D+C on the patient. They closed the curtain during the procedure but didn't close the door to the room because it was "suffocatingly hot." A nurse was screaming at them for keeping the door open, saying it was a violation of privacy, and said she was writing them up. (The patient, as far as I heard later, didn't care.)

After this incident, the GYN (who was very upset) came over to my attending and said, "Can I speak with you privately?" They went into an empty room together and shut the door behind them. And Jim tried to follow them!

I stopped him. I was like, "Jesus Christ, Jim, give them some privacy!" He tried to argue with me but quickly gave up.

Later he was talking about how he wanted to do an MD/PhD because he was most interested in genetics research, but he also wanted to do patient care. I said to him, "Are you sure you want to do patient care???" Because you don't seem to be much of a people person.