Thursday was a @#$%^$ ass kicker of a day. Surgical people are such strange, sadomasochistic, single-minded, abusive, abused, unrealistic freaks. To start, I wake up at 3:45 am. My clinical day doesn't begin officially until 5:45 am, but my day officially, officially, officially begins at 3:45 am, when my eyeballs are open.
And that sucks.
Second, I'm still not better. I'm not hallucinating, I'm no longer channeling satanic forces through a massively febrile state of altered mental status, but I'm not better. My throat is quite seriously threatening to expel itself from my body in what would certainly be an impressive display of blood and gross stuff and some really cool and previously unknown mechanics of auto-amputation. I'm almost certain it would get me top spot on the roster for Friday afternoon Morbidity and Mortality. And, I'm a fucked up and curious enough human that, if I could, I would almost goad it on.
Third, surgeons habitually disregard reality as we know it. They're kind of like Jersey Used Car Salesmen, only, not at all. Oh, you've been cut into five different, unequal pieces? No problem, we can totally fix that. And thank god, you know. Because Krishna knows that whenever I'm cut up into five different, unequal pieces, I really appreciate their optimism. At 5:45 in the morning, though, the optimism that I actually can gather up all the labs, CT/MRCP/ERCP/MRI/XRAY results, pathology reports and over night vitals on 15 different patients spread out over 6 different floors in a hospital that has centrally organized ABSOLUTELY NOTHING onto a conveniently located computer system, in 15 minutes?
Not so much.
Because 7 minutes into sprinting up and down the stairs to all sixty million different areas of the hospital where the information is separately and surreptitiously squirreled away in esoteric and poorly labeled locations and scribbled by hand in sanscrit and then lorded over by nurses who will fuck you up if you even think about moving anything from its clearly obvious place, I basically want to shove a scalpel into my own eyeball and wash it down with a shot of rubbing alcohol.
And then. AND THEN. After failing this "pathetically rudimentary" and "simplest of tasks", the surgical residents take prolonged and bowel-hurl-inducing exquisite glee in determining who, based on our abilities to perform ingratiating an illegal tasks in exchange for vital information such as, say, the blood pressure on patient A in Bed ___ of the SICU on Floor __ (really people, I don't even want to know what CIA agents have to endure to find out information any more covert than that), who gets to scrub in on what surgeries, and when.
And I can't even tell you what a hungry, future surgeon, 3rd year medical student will voluntarily do to themselves and others, for the divine privilege of watching someone's gallbladder come out. It's unfuckingbelievable.
But I am not a hungry future surgical third year medical student. Which is an amazing, exceptional place to be, because I am quickly learning that people can only abuse you if you let them. And if you don't actually give a furry little rodent bottom about inguinal hernias and the vastly astonishing ways that we repair them, it's hard to get beat up. And this, my friends, is truly amazing. Because nothing infuriates a Czar Surgeon fourth year surgical resident more than not being able to distribute sweet, sweet torture.
Resident: Okay children, listen up! If you don't get all your vitals and labs and results and reports prior to morning report, and by prior I mean 5 MINUTES BEFORE WE START, morning report you will not be able to scrub into surgery. And you will have to stay on the floors, see all the patients in recovery, you will have to talk to them, you will have to examine them, you will have to write progress notes in the charts and you will have to follow up on their recoveries, their pathology reports and their pain management. DO YOU UNDERSTAND????
So my punishment, if you will, was to stay on the floors, with sweet fourth year resident Dr. P, who cares way too much about people and I have no idea why he's completely sacrificed his life (really, literally, sacrificed. Life? Gone. Nada. Zip. Four am to eight pm. Six days a week. Forever.) to cut up unconscious people. It friggen baffles me.
And all we did, all day long, was run (not figuratively) around the hospital, checking on this or that, consulting on a patient here, arranging surgery on a patient there, trying to determine why patient A is bleeding out on floor C and why surgeon X won't take him any sooner than, hmm, next week, by which time he will be exactly 6 days expired. He sent me to do a number of different consults on my own (which scared the CRAP out of me because what if, oh, I don't know, I'm WRONG and they actually do need surgery, like, this instant) and I can organize the hell out of anything, so it felt better to be useful. And honestly, even though it would get old after a while, existing in a vast world of spinning micro-management, I rather do that all day than just standing in a sterile room under scorching lights for seventeen hours, not being able to scratch your own nose or pick your wedgie, looking at people's shiny pink insides.
