My evidence comes from posters in this thread who appear to me to be women, e.g. Jolie South, Texangirl, smq123. I am not 100% sure these posters are women but some metaphysical intuition tells me so.
YAY!! Someone finally (correctly) assumed that I'm a girl! I knew that the avatar change would pay off!
I fear for the OP's ability to cope with what lies ahead of her in medicine . . .
I wonder what you'd say if I told you that the first time I got publicly mocked by a scrub nurse (in front of my entire team) for absolutely
nothing, I was so pissed off that I went into the bathroom and slammed my fist into the wall repeatedly. Then I
slapped the door open, and stormed back out. (Yeah, I have a pretty terrible temper sometimes, especially in the face of unprovoked teasing from a scrub tech.) It made a lot of noise, and attracted a few stares, but it felt pretty damn good.
(Actually, it's statements like these that probably made people think I was a guy, and not the avatar.
😳)
Not to say that I expect to do great under that type of pressure-on the contrary I expect to crack many a time- but at the end of the day, I expect to be able to let it go and laugh it off. If you don't have a sense of humor about the whole thing, it's going to be a completely unpleasant experience and career.
Of course you need a sense of humor. But when you're "in the moment" then it's hard to find that sense of humor. Not to mention the fact that there's rarely anything to laugh about. When a circulating nurse says "Med students are pretty useless" to your face, it's not easy to conjure up a giggle. What's there to laugh about in that situation?
😡 (Ashamed to say that, many times, when faced with circulating "nurses" like that, I've said to myself, "10 years from now I'll be a physician and YOUR boss. You'll still be nothing but a faceless circ."
😳)
[EDIT: The circulator was "joking," but if you think that it would be acceptable for me to "joke" back and say "I'm worth more than a circulator nurse," think again. Circulator nurses are like dictators - they love dishing it out, but they CANNOT take it. You HAVE to kiss up to them. Ugh.]
And I think that it's the posters who rudely told the OP to "lighten up and grow up and get a thicker skin" who need the sense of humor about the whole thing....
Try this one on for size:
I was in the Gross Pathology department shadowing for the day and the pathologist just received a miscarried fetus. Well, he proceeds to grab the hand of the little guy with his forceps and wave it around throwing gang signs, talking about his longing for a good solid placenta among other things... Then he received a brain he needed to slice and section to determine if there was any hemorrhaging, so he walks over to the nurse (with the brain in hand) and says, "Gee, I'm not sure how you get through the days without this, but I guess since you've been missing it for so long you just grew accustomed to life without one..." Then he turned around and started to dice it up.
Heh heh heh...I can't believe you actually found this funny.
I'm glad to see that all that time spent away from patients has atrophied that pathologist's sense of compassion and sense of professionalism.
🙄
Have I seen attendings and residents who acted as unprofessionally as that pathologist did? Yes.
Did I rip them a new one on my evaluations?
YES - you better believe that I did.
Did I hope that they got fired on the basis of my evalutions?
YES!
Did I sign my name with a flourish at the bottom of my "anonymous" evaluation?
YES. I wanted them to know exactly who wrote those comments.
Sure, I have laughed at things that patients have said - but never making fun of them when they're down. They've always been things that the patients laughed about too. Humor is important, but what's even more important is realizing that humor isn't always appropriate.
Seriously - what that pathologist did is pretty bad. It's just a "miscarried fetus" to him - but to a patient (and to the people on the floors that are actually caring for her), that's a tragedy. (You ever tried taking care of a person who had an IUFD? And then had to "deliver" that deceased fetus by induced vaginal birth? It's not a fun experience, especially when the husband is crying by her side.)
The brain that he sectioned may have come from a patient who is YOUR age, and died in a car crash. It may have come from a child. You don't know.
What that pathologist did is pretty horrible, and I find it
equally horrible that you found it amusing.
