When you're an intern, the difference between having a nice senior resident and a mean one is tremendous. Toward the end of the year, I had a really nice resident named Liz, as opposed to my first resident Jessica, who was evil incarnate.
1. When I'm post-call, Liz was constantly asking how I'm feeling.
When I was post-call with Jessica, she was constantly yelling at me.
2. When I wrote some discharge summaries for patients who might go tomorrow on my day off, Liz told me, "Stop! You don't have to do that! I can write them myself."
Jessica told me she expected me to have discharge summaries in the chart for every single patient on my service on my day off, just in case there was some remote chance they might go. And have skeletons of notes for all my patients printed up for her to fill out.
3. When I didn't have a piece of information on a patient when I was presenting late at night, Liz said not to worry about it and we'd look it up together.
When I didn't have a piece of info for Jessica, she would yell at me then throw me out of the room and say that I couldn't present to her until I was prepared.
There was one pre-call day when I had only one patient and Liz called me at home to tell me I could "go ahead and take the day off" and she'd cover my patient since she'd be there anyway. I seriously almost started bawling.
Excuse my ignorance (pathologist, no intern year required), but what would happen if an intern told a d-bag senior resident to go shove it up their arse? Maybe not quite like that, but something more like, "That is an unreasonable request, I don't have time to do it, and I will not be doing it." Honestly, what would happen? If they're already rude, how can it get worse? Now that I'm an attending I try to not ask scutty things of rotating residents, or if I really have to, tell them up front it's scut but that I'm grateful. And if they say no because they have something else legit to do (which rarely is the case given the nature of forensic pathology rotations), I'd understand.
ReplyDeleteI think most people just don't have the courage to stand up to someone abusing them. But on the times that people have, I don't think there's been any negative consequence.
DeleteGreat team members make a huge difference! As you advanced in your training, I hope you were more like Liz and less like Jessica.
ReplyDeleteI'm an MS3 who just had my first experience with a truly mean surgery attending (my first had been quiet and hard to read, but this guy was just mean...). I almost cried in between each surgery and came home saying to myself "I HATE surgery." Which is not what I had said before. I don't get why people think that being mean to the folks lower down the chain is motivating/educational for them...
ReplyDeleteI guess residents are just a slice of humanity - some are kind and compassionate and others are mean and nasty. I will never understand, though, anyone thinking they can treat another human being cruelly for any reason. It never accomplishes any good thing.
ReplyDeleteIt's true. There are just a lot of jerks out there. The difference here is that residents feel like they have more of a license to be jerks to their underlings. If they were in some other situation, they might suppress it more.
DeleteI'm a chaplain resident (lord only knows how that compares- our process is notably different, and a residency is a nice way of getting your units of CPE while getting lots of experience, rather than a requirement) in a teaching hospital- and watching different residents and students on my units has been something of an education in itself... I recently watched two different residents dealing with the family of a patient who died on the unit- fascinating how wonderful one was, and how uncomfortable and consequently, not helpful (in what they said) the other was...
ReplyDeleteSo I'm still an MS3, but I feel the same way about the residents on the teams we work with. But in this case, not only does a nice v mean resident make a world of difference, it also makes a huge impact on your experience on a particular clerkship, which ultimately informs your feelings about the specialty. I honestly wonder how many people come to the conclusion that they hate a specialty, just because they worked with some huge dbags. It happens I think so frequently on rotations like surgery that people just come to expect it, and a lot of med students have an almost visceral hatred of things like surgery or OB that's rooted in who they worked with and how they were treated. I'm half way through my Peds rotation, and had a terrible AI who treated us all like crap (yes, an AI...as in a fourth year, approximately one year in school ahead of us) seemingly for the hell of it, and it also made me think of like, how cycles of mistreatment and douchebaggery seem to perpetuate themselves. I definitely agree with Jill--that at the end of the day we're just people, with personalities along the same spectrum as the general population. But I think, as much as we, as a profession, harp on professionalism, the notion of treating other people, especially your juniors, with dignity and respect is all too frequently left out of that discussion.
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