| I must admit, I did not really enjoy my first week at King's County, but recently I'm staring to find my niche amongst my team and have a better idea of what I should be doing, and what I can get away with not doing. But my team certainly has its characters. My attending is one of a kind. He is your typical doctor that patients fear and students are taught not to be -- he is the House of real life. His bedside manners are nonexistent. He would come into the room, not even introduce himself, and basically ask straight up questions to satisfy his own curiosity and none to comfort the patient. Thing about it is that he would always turn around after finding out whatever he needs, turn around to the team, and talk about the patient as if he weren't there. The funniest thing (to me, and not the patients, of course) is how blunt he would be about his opinion without hiding it from the patient. There was this patient who had symptoms that did not match the story that he was telling my attending. So in front of the patient, he turns around and tells us "see, he is clearly lying. Besides, he's an alcoholic, and he's probably hiding something from us." The worst is when he would have an endstage patient, turn around to us and basically says bluntly "this guy is gonna die in a few weeks." Finally, after he's done with seeing a patient, he would abruptly head towards the door without any departing words or "byes", shake his head as if he's fed up with the patient, and walk out all haughty with his hands on his hips. Basically, he's everything we're taught not to do in our humanistic lectures through the first few years of med school. However, this guy is also a frickin genius. It seems as if he does not even need to talk to the patients much to figure out what's going on - as if his eyes are a human CT/MRI scan. Basically the whole concept of "patient's story is 90% of the diagnosis" gets thrown out the window with him. And I don't blame him for the way he treats his patients. He is a critical care specialist, meaning that he works at the medical Intensive Care Unit, where all the patients are pretty much unconscious. Part of his genius derives from the fact that he normally has no real story from the patient and that he has to derive the patient's problems based on lab tests and physical findings. And he's always right. In my first week at County, he has already made 4 bets with other doctors that they have been wrong, and all four times he has been right on numerous impressive issues. His recent bet is with our Sub-Intern, whom he bet that our patient would not be discharged by next Monday. The stakes for this bet is well, Steak. He's offering to take us all out for steak dinner if he's wrong. I really hope this is the one time he's wrong. Anyways, I respect this guy, and he's funny as hell with us. The other character on my team is our Resident. This guy is soooo dorky and unintentionally funny. He literally is a real-life Milhouse (from the Simpsons) with the SAME crackly/weak voice. He does a bunch of funny things where you just need to be there to appreciate. But this morning during rounds, he had sneezed but I didn't make much of it. Then I turn to him a few seconds later and I notice that there was a HUGE clump of snot/mucus clinging onto his sleeve, which he apparently didn't notice. So I tell Sarah and we both start cracking up. Besides, if you were in a situation such as that, would you tell the person that he had a huge snot ball on his sleeve? So i'm basically keeping a close eye on it because I'm sitting next to him and I didn't want the snot clump to stick onto me. Then like 15 minutes into rounds, he bolts out of the room without telling anyone, presumably because he finally realized how nasty his sleeve was haha. Medicine is fun. |
