This isn't a cartoon, but at least it's very cruel...
On call, during hour #26 of being awake:
I’m rushing to finish writing one of three transfer orders, two discharges, and six notes, all of which had to be done before hitting my thirty hour cap. While juggling two things at once, my attending (who was actually a very nice guy) asked a question about a patient that I didn't quite catch.
I guess nobody knew the answer to the attending's question and he had to go to the patient's med rand to find the answer himself (the med rand being about 10 feet away). While the attending was going to look up the info, my evil senior resident Jessica leaned toward me and said, "You should never let the attending stand up. When he wants information, you should get up and get it before he does."
First of all, Jessica, the attending hasn't been on his feet for 26 hours straight. And he doesn't have five billion things to do in the next four hours. And furthermore, it's not like she was doing anything so important that she couldn't go look up the information herself. Why don't I just carry the attending on my freaking shoulders during rounds, how about that?
After Jessica finished quietly scolding me, the attending returned with the information he had wanted and didn't seem at all upset that I hadn't dropped everything and raced across the room to retrieve it for him.
And as you can see, almost a decade later, I'm still pissed off about it.
(Not really. But sort of.)
Whatever happened to dear old Jessica?
ReplyDeleteSee that is the nice thing about having a blog, when someone is a complete asshat I am able to file the episode into 'blog fodder' category, and it keeps me sane. :)
Yeah, it's almost worth it to have the stories. Almost.
DeleteAmazingly, I never googled her, so I didn't know until about five seconds ago what she's been up to. I had to look at her horrible face again. Anyway, she apparently did a fellowship in something kind of surprising (for her) and she's now in outpatient practice.
I imagine that at least part of her seething contempt for you was a redirection of poor treatment she received as an intern and/or jealousy that you were a better intern than she. This raises the question: do you have any idea what kind of intern she was? Was she competent? Was she already a bitch?
DeleteDo you know if Jessica was a good and/or bitchy intern?
ReplyDeleteI don't really know, although she wasn't Intern of the Year. And I heard when she became a PGY3, she was really bitchy to the PGY2s. (But I was gone by then.)
DeleteBack in the very old days, nurses used to rise when any doc (attending or resident) came in to their presence. (Most of the docs back then were men and most of the nurses were women, which I still believe had something to do with this outdated convention.) One day, when I was still a student, I was sitting at the desk writing notes when one old bear entered the station. Apparently, he stood staring at me for a while in disbelief as I continued what I was doing. He finally said, "Excuse me, but are you going to stay seated?"
ReplyDelete"Yes."
"But you are a student nurse and I am a doctor."
"That's right."
"You are supposed to stand when a doctor arrives; it shows respect."
"No, I am supposed to finish writing this patient's note; it shows professionalism."
This was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that I was called to the dean's office for insubordination. Tricia
While I was not there during this incident and don't know Jessica, I do have another perspective. I was told something similar as an intern; but the resident who told me was trying to save me from getting evals saying I wasn't a good resident.
ReplyDeleteThat was the absolute least of my concerns at that moment.
DeleteOf course it was; you were on hour 26, for heaven's sake! However, where I was a resident, bad evals from pissy attendings had actually gotten residents fired. It was not a mentally healthy environment.
DeleteWe have this one fake, insincere, patronizing resident, who feels very strongly (based on her behaviour) that she is much smarter than everybody else. To be honest, I think part of it is she's trying really hard not to screw up, but does it in a very patronizing way.
ReplyDeleteImagine her surprise when she wasn't elected as chief. Although her surprise tells me that obviously she has no idea, and that's probably because nobody ever talked to her about it.