Mondays are hard enough. doc's coming in the beginning of the week after a weekend full of events for their patients that they need to attend to, and subsequently, meaning i have to tend to their needs; their being the doctors, the patients and everyone in between. It's cool though, that's why i chose to be a PA; to be that spoke in the wheel where the coordination of care occurs and the patient ultimately gets some fine fuckin care. yep, there we are, physician assistants, the center of patient care. Funny thing about being in the middle of it all, everyone wants a piece of you.
It started with a bang when i walked into the Medicine Department PA Office. Oh yeah, we are so special we have our own office. Yeah baby. It is the size of a bathroom, with 16 or so lockers in there the width of a shoe, and it's two to a locker and they're on top of one another. There's this table in the middle of the box that's something out of my niece's tea party set with 4 whole chairs around it. A desk with a computer on it that the administrators constantly pull the solitaire game off of and one smarty pa keeps reinstalling it. A instant coffee maker takes up half the desk that has this sludge in it on fridays, saturdays and sundays when alex works, the only person who makes it and i am always suspicious of it's close resemblance to a code brown (use yer imagination). Next to that is this folding t.v. dinner tray with the microwave precariously balanced on it, with plastic utensils, napkins and sundry condiments piles atop that; just one good hip check would make quite the yard sale in our little sandbox.
The chief PA is always complaining about how close the microwave is to the desk where she does most of her scheduling and that she's getting irradiated. Makes me think she can be a spice now. Next to the house of cards microwave stand is the worlds tiniest trash can. And if it's not small enough, let's mention that there are there cardboard boxes everyone uses from the cafeteria - they're a simple design, fold open, put your food in them so that you don't have to carry "open food" through the cootie-filled halls. Except they don't have a top and once yo shit is upstairs, people throw them away! ACK. They don't get recycled and most folks don't even break em down before throwing them into thumbalina's trash can, so in about 5 boxes, the can is inefficiently full and the chick who empties the trash rarely comes around. Do you think folks stop stuffin stuff in there when the trash reaches the top. No siree. We have masters degree's and can care for critically ill patients, but we're still human beings by god and we will NOT be the ones to take out the trash. I digress.
So I come into the office with my partner in crime, Wingnut, and we're late. Normally this isn't a big deal, but one guy called out sick, one terminally lazy drama queen is late because her car broke down and even though we're going to simply put our names on the board on the ward then have breakfast, we aren't there when she wants to dole out the census and she's irritated (and irradiated).
Not only that but one of the shit-stirrers is telling her about this most egregious act yesterday when an overwhelmed house attending was overburdened with patients and wanted me to take one of his since the private doc agreed to move him to the PA service. I had discharged 3 patients already, had a decently light load and liked this doc and simply said "sure, no problem, happy to help". But when Mr Stick-up-his-ass found out I'd been so helpful, he began to vomit volumes of reasons why this kind of behavior would only lead the the landslide of attendings ignoring the protocol for patient admitting and management. That we would be the lackey's for these house officers and schlep their shit instead of the honorable service we were. Oh fer FUCKS SAKE. So the hospitalist that day saw no issue with it, and said, we'll take em - meaning i will take em. Good. But Mr personality can't let it go. And there he was a full 24 hours later winding the chief up - which was all to easy since everyone was late and she loves to be her control-freak self and protect the PA service from these, undoubted evil-doers. IN fact, I'm willing to bet he can make a case for them having weapons of mass destruction.
So she spins her double wide butt in her chair and accusingly asks me "What happened???" as if I'd set her house on fire and left her family naked in the streets. I calmly replied "Well, Doc M said he had a PA case he's been taking care of but that Dr R was taking him now, and Dr Z had already seen him today, and then gave me the lowdown and thanked me profusely for helping him out." She continued to stare at me and then asked "Why did he do that?" Now, I thought this an incredibly stupid question. How am I to know the thoughts and desires of another human being, much less one that I am so tenuously connected to? I could guess, but that's not what she's asking me. In fact, what she's asking me is 'how dare he, when he knows the rules'; a rhetorical question in fact. But I couldn't and had no desire to make that leap and simply said (a bit too smartly i think) "How can I know what he was thinking? I don't know why, I can only tell you how or what he said/did" to which her peanut sized brain rejected this information and simply gave me her version of 'does not compute' which sounded like this: "I don't understand what you're telling me" in a volume slightly inappropriate for our proximity and emotion. I wanted to say "what part of that English phrasing didn't you understand? Am i speaking in tongues? I can't read the mans mind and anyway you want to know why someone would, in your opinion, take advantage of the PA staff, to wit i would reply, they didn't, i did him a favor and so fucking what?????
The whole thing was quick, tense and not so pretty. I felt I had been dragged into overstepping my role as newbie PA. Great way to start a Monday. But it gets better....
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
0 comments:
Post a Comment