Of course, of course

First, though - what the hell is wrong with New Hampshire??!?!!!?! I mean, you'd think that a year of living there would be more than enough for me to stop asking this question, but, I mean...at least Obama took Iowa.

I voted in NH in the last presidential election. They gave me a legal-sized sheet of paper, and a pen. It's the only time in my very lengthy voting history (ahem) that I've voted straight ticket...because all six people I happened to want to vote for were democrats, and, um, there were only about six races on the ballot.

With a pen. Did I mention the pen? No hanging chads in New Hampshire. Freakin' ass-backwards state. I should've known to turn and run right then.

Then again....here's the end of my day today. I walked out of the hospital, called my folks, and when my dad picked up and asked me how I was, said very loudly "I AM SO FRIGGIN' GLAD TO BE OUT OF THIS GODDAM HOSPITAL." Then I sat in [long string of expletives] basketball traffic. Because, of course, the hospital sits in the middle of the college campus, literally. You know that scene in Renaissance Man where Danny Devito gets awakened by the Army boot camp recruits doing loud morning calisthenics at 5am, and runs around the grounds yelling "GO NAVY!"

I was thisclose to opening all my windows and yelling "Go Duke! Go Duke!"

But I did take advantage of the down time by texting my co-intern with the following message:

You're going to need to commit me soon for homicidality. Also, Betsy wants you to round on seven patients tomorrow morning because she can't write that many notes. (Maybe if we share a room on the inpatient unit, they'll give us a group rate?)

This was followed by a forty minute conversation with Mike and then an hour and a half phone conversation with my attending.

Today....I....oh my God.

Today was the first day of this new curriculum on the part of the Family Medicine department where they corral all their residents for learning on Wednesday mornings. Which meant the only residents left were me, Mike, and the Duke resident. Mike was postcall, and he'd had a rough night. So I made him sign all his work out to me and took his pager and then my attending (have I given her a pseudonym yet? I don't remember. Let's call her Sarah) and I sent him to go sleep for a while. And then we went off and tried to take care of some patients and get some stuff done and had some very manic and wacky walk rounds.

In the midst of this, by the way, we were awfully punchy, and I don't remember for the life of me what prompted this, but she started walking down the hall singing the Mr. Ed theme song. And she gets to the "famous Mr. Ed! Wil-bur!!" part, and...I'm so not kidding...someone in one of the patient room whinnied. Right on cue. It was the funniest damn thing I've heard in a long time.

We've conferred - we both heard it.

So then Betsy, our upper level, pages me. We'd both thought she was in clinic. Know why? Because this morning she told us that she had clinic. So she pages me, and is like, where are you? She's back from lecture (an hour and a half later than everyone else, by the way) and is all pissed off because you know, if I don't keep her informed she will never be able to run the service. And then we meet up with her (after we do some actual, you know, work), she sits us down and has this, like, 30 minute intervention. Which means basically she, a second year resident, berated Sarah, my attending physician, for a full half hour in front me, an intern from another department. About how Sarah was not respecting her and undermining her ability to do her job by - more or less - helping too much.

I....just....I...for.....what the fuck, woman?

What it boils down to, frankly, is she's making all of this all about her. It isn't about her. You know what? It's not about her at all. It's about taking care of patients. Something that needs to be done as a team. And you know what else? If she was doing her fucking job, Sarah and her co-attending, the, um, department chair, wouldn't need to interfere so much.

I really wanted to smack her. What I did, after about twenty minutes, was interrupt. And she says, "you're interrupting me."

I said, "Yes." And then I pointed out that I wasn't really involved, here, so, um, could I go take care of the page-long list of jobs I had to do?

She says, "No. This involves you."

How it involved me in any manner other than making me an audience to her histrionic, self-indulgent unprofessional behavior is totally beyond me.

Part of what she brought up was how poorly it reflected on her when the resident coming on call walked into the call room and found Mike asleep. Neither Mike, nor Sara, nor I can figure out why. It had nothing to do with her. It wasn't about her. It was a benevolent thing for us to do. And at one point she brought up the duty hours issue. I was like, oh, honey, don't even start. Because let me tell you, no one knows the ACGME duty hour rules better than I do. Not after life at the Emerald Palace.

Sarah slipped me her phone number on the way out and mouthed "call me." She felt really bad about me having to be involved in all this, she says. I was like, um, it wasn't you. Betsy wouldn't have let it go down any other way. ::sigh:: I don't understand people sometimes. I've really hit my limit with Betsy's behavior. I'm really not sure how I'm going to handle three more weeks of her without any hair-pulling. And of course next week Mike and I switch places and I stop taking Saturday call at State Hospital and start taking call with the Family Medicine team every fourth night. I'm a little concerned about this, because Mike's mantra over the past few weeks has become "I hate my life."

Fortunately, I have tomorrow off. Because, you know, I get one day off a week, and I'm on call on the weekends. Thank God. I think Maggie's excited about it, too.