Monday, September 24, 2007

Sums it up, in a nutshell

So, I'm now frankly plagiarizing this from PenguinShrink's blog, because I've been trying to succintly recount this story, and I'm always too verbose, and she just sums it up so very well:

Scene: Thursday, 8am-ish, morning report. A room full of medicine attendings, two psych residents, and a bunch of nurse practitioners and physicians assistants (NPs and PAs, aka "physician extenders"). The medical director comes in and starts the conference (which is supposedly meant to let everyone know about the patients the on-call person saw overnight and make announcements) with a discussion about the forms for the new hospital. She makes the point that the forms need to be very directive - pick one of the following options sort of thing. I agree with this. However, her reasoning was distinctly offensive: "there are going to be psych residents filling this out, and nurses interpreting it". Damn, bitch, did you not look around the room before you walked in?

Yeah...just, yeah....

Today I had this one patient who ATE MY WHOLE DAY (and, you know, not like my other patients suddenly disappeared). Whole damn day! He came in right after we got out of morning report, and when I left at 5:30 they were actively trying to transfer him to another hospital where he could get, you know, real medical care (I felt like he should be in short proximity to an ICU; I think they just didn't want to deal with the paperwork of him crashing in the middle of the night). The respiratory therapist and I spent about half the day begging and pleading and cajoling and bargaining with him to get his blood gas drawn, and listening to - I kid you not - a nearly 40-year-old, grown man cry, whine, and whimper like a six year old. I was about ready to smack him upside the head for behaving like a moron, but I remained pleasant and persuasive and kept telling him what a good boy he was. Aaaaand then I drugged him, which helped the most. But somebody in this scenario owes me a beer for all of the sweet-talking I did with this guy, I just can't quite figure out who. Which makes collecting on that whole thing problematic...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I would just spring it on Asshole Attending when he gets back. "You owe me a beer." "Oh, thanks for the grand welcome ba- what?" "I saved a patient in your unit while you were gone. You owe me a beer."

Hee hee.

Anonymous said...

you should have gone into anesthesia, our patients sleep the whole time. As long as we wake up the same number we knock out, our job is done!

Matt Conner said...

Okay, hon, beer's on me. Just for working at the OTHER State Hospital.

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