Tales from Residency: What did I tell you?

There was one attending I had who would sometimes come up to me all pissed off that I hadn't done something she told me to do.

For example, in rounds one morning, she asked me if I got in touch with patient Mr. Smith's therapists about some issue.

I was like, "What?"

She insisted that she had told me to do this the day before, but I highly doubted that. First, anything I was told to do, I immediately wrote on my to-do list, which I always consulted before leaving for the day.

Second, if she had asked me to do that, I would have immediately asked the follow-up question, "Who are his therapists?" (The assigning of therapists had no sort of logic I could determine.)

I think maybe she was thinking about telling me to do that. Or maybe she told me and I didn't hear her. But it seemed to happen all the time when I was rotating with this attending, but never happened with any other attending.