One of the commenters remarked that I must not have had a very good experience on my OB/Gyn rotation. Bingo. (Not to offend our colleagues in OB/Gyn, who I'm sure are all very nice. You understand that while everything depicted is true--SO VERY TRUE!--obviously I have selected and amplified for comic effect.)
Have your own stories of scut? Share them with us in the comments section! It is very cathartic, you'll see.
Wow... it seems that almost everywhere - okay, in a lot of places at least - the OB department seems to send the poor med student or intern to get the food. Same thing here in the Philippines!
ReplyDeleteAs a med student I rotated through various charity and government hospitals and the scut was insane - yes, delivering samples, getting food, etc. - and other med students (I drew the line at this!) would 'lend' patients their own money to pay for the rental of mech vents.
Then as an intern in an upscale, private hospital - scut work was still scut work but only more, well, upscale. Playing DJ in the OR was/is the role of the ortho intern - do make sure to bring the 'good' speakers and create different playlists depending on consultants' whims. We were also 'invited' out for 'drinks' one night with the consultants - not to drink, but to stay sober and drive home the consultants who drank! Somehow it didn't occur to them as the drank into the wee hours of the morning that us interns had to scrub in at 7am... the same morning!
I think one of the most useful pieces of knowledge I got from my surgery rotation was that pandora dot com exists. No need for even an iPod!
ReplyDeleteAlso, I got really tired of Bob Marley. There are only so many times you can listen to Legends on repeat. It kinda makes you understand how it became part of the marijuana sub-culture.
When I was a PGY-3 in surgery, my chief once told me to get coffee for him and the attending instead of scrubbing into an emergent carotid. As if.
ReplyDeletei have definitely done the DJ in the OR thing, even during the ipod era!
ReplyDeletealso, as a resident on an anesthesia/procedures elective, i was once told that "the most useful thing [I] could do" was pushing the silence button on the alarm monitor. *rolling eyes*
luckily, all the other anesthesiologists i worked with were great.
CC3... still playing DJ. Except that in the era of Pandora, I had to press the "I'm Still Listening" button. The music would stop, the attending would notice and shout out "I'm still listening!" Then some underling would run over to the computer and press the button.
ReplyDeleteplaying DJ on my uro rotation saved me from having to scrub :)
ReplyDeleteSeriously, the worst scut is being the clerk or junior resident on a non-gyne service and every time a gyne problem comes up you're told to do the vag exam. Every time. This happened to me on medicine, pediatrics, emerg, and ortho. I had to do a vag exam ON ORTHO. I like gyne - but that's besides the point. I don't like doing gyne exams on 90 year old women in casts.
ReplyDeleteI'm starting third year this June, with my first rotation begin surgery (I have lost my mind, yes). I will certainly be sharing my scut stories with you. Love your blog, can't wait to get your book!
ReplyDeleteok, i think i have the hands-down most demeaning scut ever. i was on fam med rotation as an msIII, and the attending (after hitting me in the face with a USED! speculum of a different patient in an attempt to share the unique smell of bv) instruted me to use forceps to remove the pubic lice from a 17 year old boy for almost an hour.
ReplyDeletei told her that the shampoo would work better, but she said this "would be instructive for both of you." to top it off she couldn't spare her MA to be a chaperone, so i was by myself for this endeavor. i was so mad my head almost exploded, in a addition to the humiliation of the poor patient.
Searched the entire hospital for a speculum - plastic preferred by the resident - for gyn onc. Spent quite a while doing so, seeing as L&D was on the opposite side of the hospital from the cancer patients. Returned - finally - and the fellow says "plastic speculums suck."
ReplyDeleteWow. I think med students have to do worse scut than vet students. I think the worst I've had to do is clean instruments after surgery, since in the economic downturn they've laid off all our instrument cleaning student workers.
ReplyDeleteOh, and there was that one weekend when the techs refused to do daytime treatments so I had q2 tube feeding of a septic foal.... That poor mare got to the point where her milk let down when I walked into the stall.
I really liked your comic! I definitely have seen aspects of that on my OB rotation--especially with the private patients and all of the signs all over saying "NO MED STUDENTS". It makes me feel very...Irish? ("No Irish Need Apply").
ReplyDeleteI scrubbed in on most of the surgeries my attending performed during my MS3 rotation so he took the opportunity to pimp me not on anatomy but on what song was playing from his ipod. Needless to say the songs were written before I was born so I didn't do very well. Luckily the scrub nurse started writing the answers on her glove so I didn't look totally ridiculous.
ReplyDeleteWe had an attending who would pimp us on Bible trivia.
ReplyDeleteAttending: Here's one for you guys. The field that Judas Iscariot purchased with his betrayal money was called Aceldama, but as what was it also known?
Me: Uh...Jesus?
One of the OB attendings is notorious for pimping on random shit. His latest craze is metric conversions, so, before my first surgery with him, my residents were urgently reminding me not of the anatomy or the steps of the procedure but of, "OK, how many centimeters to an inch? How many grams to a pound?"
ReplyDeleteI agree, these things always happened in OB or general surgery (maybe why I chose internal medicine?). We had an OB resident widely known to be toxic, who sent my friend to get her a coke, and after the coke was placed in front of her, said icily, "now...OPEN IT!"
ReplyDeleteWhile on my plastic surgery rotation as a second year EM resident (mission: improve cosmesis of facial lac repairs and learn how to treat hand injuries), I was sent to a clinic AN HOUR AWAY one morning to pick up collagen filler for a private patient who was coming in to have her nasolabial creases injected that afternoon.
ReplyDeleteI did my M3 surgery rotation literally right after the first generation iPods came out, and my jerkbox of a vascular chief got one. He was NEVER going to give me more than a Marginal score but promised me an Honors if I could name 10 consecutive songs in a row. He didn't realize he left his iPod off shuttle and in alphabetical order. I won the bet, but the jerk didn't give me Honors as promised.
ReplyDeleteoff white nike
ReplyDeletehermes belt
adidas yeezy
kyrie 7
yeezy supply
lebron 16 shoes
golden goose
kd 13
kyrie 7
calvin klein outlet
golden goose sale
kyrie 8
ReplyDeletegolden goose sneakers
off white
palm angels t shirt
kevin durant
bapesta shoes
ggdb
bapesta
kd shoes
kd 12