I saw this electronic billboard at the Philadelphia Airport:
The demise of E. coli
We will never learn. E. coli will always get the last laugh. And for the record, E. coli is also a “native” of our colon. He makes Vitamin K for us. His nemesis C. diff is just waiting for him to die so that we can be blessed with foul-smelling, runny stools 10+ times a day (pseudomembranous colitis).
Pharma goodies...okay, maybe not the French chocolate cookies
I’m going to miss the days when big pharma showered gifts embroidered with their logos to doctors. Ever since the voluntary ban on branded gifts, pharma has ceased to supply our department with pens. The resident area still has several left, but our stash is rapidly depleting. Given my hospital’s hybrid documentation system, my pens actually run out of ink every 2 weeks, assuming I don’t lose it or contaminate it in a C. diff patient room.
Sure, I understand the ethical problems of product placement, especially if pharma is giving us mugs, napkins, mp3 music players, bags, flash drives, and whatever-else-you-least-think-is-excessive…but pens? Who cares if I have my pen advertises a monoclonal antibody? In fact, some branded pens are decent writing implements–they don’t clump out dried ink like those crappy bank pens. Read more…
I hate writing progress notes. Sure, they’re essential to document to a patient’s hospital course, but most of the note is repetitive. Even worse, my hospital uses a hybrid medical record system. The computerized portion stores all laboratory values and initial consults. The daily progress notes by the primary team and consults are all handwritten. The nursing pods usually have only one or two computers, one of which is always used by nursing to view people.com and perez hilton. Thus, every morning I vie for that lone open computer while fumbling through illegible chickenscratch. Do we regress that quickly from grade school? And clearly I’ve discovered that penmanship doesn’t correlate with hand dexterity- surgeon scribble is no better than internist scribble. I’m no calligrapher, but at least I make an active effort to be legible.
This cycle repeats for each of the 8-12 patients every morning for 4 week blocks at a time. That’s enough to push anyone into insanity, or any cynical housestaff to reinforce his jaded outlook on the medical system. And if slovenly human behavior doesn’t do it, the computers like to seize and go into endless reboots daily around 6am – 8am. That’s hospital IT (information technology) for ya.
Despite all the recent political “change”, I certainly don’t think that our society is rushing to become “nicer” people, nor does it appear that we have any urgency to do so in the near future. As I recall, President Obama had even commented on stamping out evil in his acceptance speech. We are actually on our way to be bullies. In any case, I think it’s hilarious how euphemistic we are at assigning titles to jobs, especially in the hospital.
Janitor = Environmental Services.
Chief Resident: We have to lock up the Keurig coffee packets, because environmental services (ES) has been using ours.
Me: ES? (What? Health Inspectors stealing our coffee? How often does that happen?)
…[pause]…
Me: Oh, the janitors are stealing our stuff.
K-cup coffee pods...the ones the hospital janitors are stealing
Janitors should be janitors, just like the Janitor on Scrubs. I get the derogatory connotations, but hell, apparently interns aren’t considered residents to some people (prior article).
I’m working on night float this week for the Heme-Onc service. This means that I take all admissions coming in, and manage the floor patients. The one perk of this job is not having to write progress notes in the morning. The flip side is that you have to deal with otherwise stable patients who go berserk at night. Aside from my pager going nuts occasionally, the hospital itself is relatively quiet.
medical resident work area