Sunday, May 17, 2009

More Eggs, Anyone?

Felt that it might be time to expand on a few more of the personalities with whom I work...

First, however, a brief tangent (me, a tangential rabbit trail?? Never!) onto a pet peeve directed at all of you pet owners out there. It never ceases to amaze me how people who work in human health fields seem to think an animal hospital is somehow different. Today, an emergency triage was brought back to ICU and we were beginning to examine it amongst all the other critical patients when we see an unknown lady just walk through the door. One of the assistants went and stopped her saying "I'm sorry but you can't be back here." Her reply? "Oh, it's ok. I'm a registered nurse." !!!!!!!!!!!! You, of all people, should know that you don't just randomly wander back to the ICU; way not cool!! We, as veterinarians and vet techs don't wander into the ICU at the hospital when we go there for an emergency visit. Come on, show the same courtesy please!

Now for the scrambled egg serving of the day.

I fondly call them big lazy, medium lazy, and little lazy. (Medium lazy left, though, thus disturbing my happy trio.) They are the non-boarded, internship trained so-called emergency doctors. They fill shifts that the interns cannot and cover swing to give us "more experienced support." HA! Bull-hockey-doo. They work three days a week (two day shifts and one overnight) and spend the majority of that time sitting on their hineys. When it's crazy-busy the intern is still expected to see all the cases. The excuse for not helping? Well, it's your internship, you're here to learn. Once again, bull-hockey-doo. Basically, they are just really good at getting paid for doing nothing. Maybe I should study their technique... My other most favorite thing about the lazies is the way they get away with certain things that would cause on of us, as interns, to be roasted. A couple of prime examples would be the following: 1) a case staying on ER for discharge later in the day (i.e. not transferring to a specialty service for continued care) for which they leave no discharge instructions translating to mean that someone has to take up the slack and spend time typing those on a case that should be just a baby-sitting affair; 2) they stop even looking at ER cases that walk through the door 30-45 minutes prior to their shift ending or prior to the intern's arrival (when they are on swing). This means that cases that may be critical can just sit in a cage while the distraught owner waits. This makes me very angry and the turn-about is that if one of the interns did this (not that any of us are actually that lax, even my less favorites) we would be screamed at in a sub-human fashion. Oh wait, I forgot, I guess we are less than human since we are interns...

Bowing to the request for more on Gigi the Hooker. Gigi is the top administrative official at this clinic site (it is now owned by a corporation that owns multiple clinics). She wears tall black leather boots with spikey heels to work most of the time. One of her chief jobs is to go out and visit our local referring veterinarians (rDVMs). Some of them have gotten annoyed at the clinic because there were some issues in the past when the rDVMs were left out of the loop about there own patients. Gigi is really good at kissing-up and selling the clinic to them again. Hence my nickname for her as the hooker. I also sometimes refer to her as the Joker because when she smiles her face resembles him a bit.

That's all the eggs for now but I'm saving more for later. The other recent event/comment that I will share because it amused me is this: one of our specialists just started working here while I was away then I came back and was almost immediately working closely with him on his service. He asked where I was headed from here and when I told him I was doing another internship he asked if I had a propensity for leather, whips, and chains... As I usually answer when stating my plans, "thus confirming my insanity." Later y'all.

No comments: