Dr Less was everybodys favorite. He did the minute workups. Discharged fast, ordered practically nothing. Even on a Monday if you knew you had Dr Less on shift, it was to be a good day.
Dr Less is a golden boy. The luck god smiles down on him. He's never gone to court, never been sued.
Nurses love him for the most part but it could be a bit scary when he'd want to discharge to followup an old lady who passed out cold in church and had been witnessed bradying to 40 on the monitor. Every so often an astute nurse would advocate for admission and he'd roll his eyes and cave with a smartass but good natured comment.
Then there's Dr More. Poor Dr More.
We hated his work (massive workups on everyone) but we love the guy. He's the one you want on when you drag in your sick mom. He's kind, more than thorough and the nicest guy ever. He'd suture a patient and then tell them the next time he worked, and to stop by and not sign in, just ask for him so he could re-evaluate them or remove their sutures without a visit.
Of course bad luck follows him like the plague.
Take for instance the unit secretary whose no-good husband needed a work note. Dr More caved and wrote a note for him, because he really cares about the employees, he didn't want old Marthas husband to lose his job and cause a hardship for Martha.
Next day he gets an irate phone call from the mechanic shop manager yelling at him "Doctor More, you wrote a work note for Mr Martha but he was seen by his coworkers in a BAR every day he was absent! Did you even TREAT him? Was he even SICK? Where is your INTEGRITY, DOCTOR?"
Ouch ouch ouch. No good deed, indeed.
Then we had an older lady, visiting our town and ready to head home when she got weak and had a fall. Her daughter brought her in and he did the full workup, presented admission.
I witnessed and charted both the patients and her daughters refusal for admission. Dr More was adamant about her needing admission but they flatly refused. She wanted to go home and see her own doctor, she didn't want her daughter to have to stay in our town away from her kids, she wanted to get admitted to her own hometown hospital. He grudgingly agreed to *discharge* the patient to home, 2 hours away with her daughter driving, they said they understood his doom and gloom warnings and promised she'd follow up the next day.
An hour or so later we get a call from another hospital, the patient had fallen again, at a rest stop, and had broken her hip. The daughter hadn't told us she was a nurse and she was screaming in the background about how could her mom have been discharged, (not AMA) and how this is all Dr Mores fault.
I reassured him, telling him that I had charted the conversation I'd witnessed but he was just crestfallen, he didn't get angry and defensive or vent, he wasn't worried about his own ass, he just felt horrible.
The poor guy.
Dr Less didn't always get lucky though. One memory comes to mind of him on a slammed busy day. he was reading aloud a patients lab results over and over while scratching his head, coupling it with her presentation as her diagnosis dawned on him just a minute or two later than it had dawned on everyone else within a 2 mile radius of the ER.
"Holy shit, she's in fucking D.I.C!"
We nodded.
"What the fuck do we do?"
A particularly dry charge nurse volunteered, "You tell us! You're the doctor!"
I suggested, totally jokingly "google it!" Tee hee, as I went to the pyxis for another patients med.
Got my med and turned back around, to find Dr Less hard at work, googling.
No comments:
Post a Comment