Working with Idiots

I work with idiots. Correction: I don't work WITH idiots, the people I work with are a great bunch of caring, intelligent people. I actually work ALONG SIDE the idiots. Otherwise known as the doctors. This is a drawback of working in a training wheel facility. I understand it is a teaching hospital (calling it a learner hospital would frighten the patients) and they are here to learn, but I expect a rudimentary handle on medicine if they are going to be the primary caregiver. Jeez!

I arrived in a not so swell mood after having had another knock-down, drag-out fight with insomnia (guess who won?) and assumed care of a patient whose water had broken at 0400 and she had been in the hospital roughly 2 hours. She had, at one time, been positive for tuberculosis but had been unable to finish her medication because she got fatty liver disease. However, she assured the nurse and doctor before me, she had had a negative chest x-ray. Great, I think. So, where's the documentation so I can get rid of the isolation cart and the particulate filtering mask that makes me so claustrophobic I may need psych meds. "Yeah, I can't find it." the resident tells me. Perhaps we could order one? I ask. This was disregarded as the resident was off-going and couldn't have given two shits whether I had to wear a hazmat suit just to take a temperature. The patient was also not contracting a whole heck of a lot and I inquired whether or not we should kind of help her along. This is at 0700. By 1000 the oncoming yahoos were out of a crash C-section and I asked them the same questions. The response I got was "Where did she have her x-ray done?" Call me crazy, but I think this is information someone should have had before the patient had been on the floor for 5 hours. I finally wrestled a chest x-ray out of them by noon, all the while badgering them regarding getting this chick's labor started. At one point my professionalism took a vacation, as it is wont to do, and I yelled across the nurse's station "We're looking at 10 hours since her water broke, do we feel like a little pit at any point or what?" The response? "Let me check on her x-ray." Okay, see, by this point I'm over worrying about that shit, and would like to move on to the whole reason she's on the floor in the first place. I was then informed that her lungs were negative for TB. Great. WHAT ABOUT HER UTERUS?!?

At 1400, just before they are ready to rush to the second crash C-section of the day, I practically tackled the attending and said, "What are we going to do with this chick?" She looked at me blankly and said, "well, she's on pit isn't she?" "Ah, noooo, I've been trying to get an order for that all day." She then whips around to the brain trust behind her, chews them a few new orifices, and says to me, "Start her on some pit." That's all I needed to hear. Morons!