Fat II
Right,
Sorry it's been so long between posts. But news:
The guy I posted on a while back, the approximately 130 kg (that's almost 300 pounds) guy who wanted to lose weight?
Well, the weight's dropping off him. He's doing the high intensity exercise. He's cut back from eating eight slices of bread with his lunch to none, he doesn't eat when he wakes up at night. He's feeling a hell of a lot better than any time since he's been in here. He's stopped the antipsychotics and he's thinking clearly. I saw him the other day and he is grinning ear to ear.
At this stage, and it's early days yet, it's a success story, one of the relatively few in Mauro. In a few years he may be appearing on the telly waving his trousers around. You heard it here first.
And now I'm going to use the internet for the time-honoured purpose of bitching about my colleagues.
Winter is crunch time in the ED. More people get sick, (including doctors), including many from sitting in the waiting room with the other sick people. More people get jacked off with the long delays. There are more traffic accidents, more pneumonias (pneumoniae?) and many many more sick kids. And if a doctor or nurse is going to decide they've finally had it with this shit, and tell Admin exactly where they can stick their proctoscope or rectal thermometer, odds are it'll be winter.
So every year we are understaffed.
But this year we thought ahead. We advertised over East and got two new doctors, junior registrar level (my level). They arrived with glowing recommendations.
Suspiciously glowing, in retrospect, because they are both crap. I can't say that with certainty about one, the female, because I've never actually seen her work (I was on one shift with her but honestly did not realise she was a doctor, because she just stood around watching people - I thought she was a medical student), but I've worked with the other guy, and he's no bloody good at all.
He's not all bad. He seems a nice person. And in anther context, it may be relaxing to watch him, his slow, graceful, almost tai chi like movements as he takes five minutes to walk from one cubicle to the next, fifteen minutes examining an Xray of a (not actually broken) forearm (two bloody bones, for God's sake!), and three quarter of an hour to examine a child's twisted ankle. Ninety minutes - I am not making this up - elapsed from my telling him that Mrs Quibble in cubicle sixteen needed three medications (and I told him what they were, how much and how they should be given) and him even writing them down so the nurse could get them.
Anyway, I feel bad writing this. He's a good person, and ED is frightening. But how in God's name did that other hospital sell him to ours as a level four doctor with significant emergency experience when he can't read a chest Xray or an ECG? He actually contibutes negative working hours, because everyone he sees I have to see too, and they stay in hospital so long I expect someone to celebrate a birthday in here, or perhaps conceive and bring to term a child.
I tell you what. I am going to find out the names of the two other hospitals. And then, if we can't send them a crap doctor, I'm going to send them some patients. I know the some pretty difficult to handle people, and not only via the prisons and the psychiatric wards. Mrs Quillscribble, who wrote eight volumes (I am not making this up, I saw five of them) of complaint letters to the hospital. Joe Testudangli, who presents every second day demanding someone look at his (remarkably unremarkable) scrotum. Clive "Monkey-boy" Carter, a seventeen stone bikie with Tourettes, paranoia, a short temper and an unattractive skin complaint. Jamie Harradine, with his crippling phobia about sobriety and a belief that women in uniform (any women, any uniform - once a trumpeter in the Salvation Army) find him a sexual magnet, whose idea of a good Friday night is to get arrested by two policemen and then attended by some nurses.
And I'm going to send each and every copy of the patient notes to those hospitals with a little card saying "Compliments of Florey Emergency Department."
Sorry it's been so long between posts. But news:
The guy I posted on a while back, the approximately 130 kg (that's almost 300 pounds) guy who wanted to lose weight?
Well, the weight's dropping off him. He's doing the high intensity exercise. He's cut back from eating eight slices of bread with his lunch to none, he doesn't eat when he wakes up at night. He's feeling a hell of a lot better than any time since he's been in here. He's stopped the antipsychotics and he's thinking clearly. I saw him the other day and he is grinning ear to ear.
At this stage, and it's early days yet, it's a success story, one of the relatively few in Mauro. In a few years he may be appearing on the telly waving his trousers around. You heard it here first.
And now I'm going to use the internet for the time-honoured purpose of bitching about my colleagues.
Winter is crunch time in the ED. More people get sick, (including doctors), including many from sitting in the waiting room with the other sick people. More people get jacked off with the long delays. There are more traffic accidents, more pneumonias (pneumoniae?) and many many more sick kids. And if a doctor or nurse is going to decide they've finally had it with this shit, and tell Admin exactly where they can stick their proctoscope or rectal thermometer, odds are it'll be winter.
So every year we are understaffed.
But this year we thought ahead. We advertised over East and got two new doctors, junior registrar level (my level). They arrived with glowing recommendations.
Suspiciously glowing, in retrospect, because they are both crap. I can't say that with certainty about one, the female, because I've never actually seen her work (I was on one shift with her but honestly did not realise she was a doctor, because she just stood around watching people - I thought she was a medical student), but I've worked with the other guy, and he's no bloody good at all.
He's not all bad. He seems a nice person. And in anther context, it may be relaxing to watch him, his slow, graceful, almost tai chi like movements as he takes five minutes to walk from one cubicle to the next, fifteen minutes examining an Xray of a (not actually broken) forearm (two bloody bones, for God's sake!), and three quarter of an hour to examine a child's twisted ankle. Ninety minutes - I am not making this up - elapsed from my telling him that Mrs Quibble in cubicle sixteen needed three medications (and I told him what they were, how much and how they should be given) and him even writing them down so the nurse could get them.
Anyway, I feel bad writing this. He's a good person, and ED is frightening. But how in God's name did that other hospital sell him to ours as a level four doctor with significant emergency experience when he can't read a chest Xray or an ECG? He actually contibutes negative working hours, because everyone he sees I have to see too, and they stay in hospital so long I expect someone to celebrate a birthday in here, or perhaps conceive and bring to term a child.
I tell you what. I am going to find out the names of the two other hospitals. And then, if we can't send them a crap doctor, I'm going to send them some patients. I know the some pretty difficult to handle people, and not only via the prisons and the psychiatric wards. Mrs Quillscribble, who wrote eight volumes (I am not making this up, I saw five of them) of complaint letters to the hospital. Joe Testudangli, who presents every second day demanding someone look at his (remarkably unremarkable) scrotum. Clive "Monkey-boy" Carter, a seventeen stone bikie with Tourettes, paranoia, a short temper and an unattractive skin complaint. Jamie Harradine, with his crippling phobia about sobriety and a belief that women in uniform (any women, any uniform - once a trumpeter in the Salvation Army) find him a sexual magnet, whose idea of a good Friday night is to get arrested by two policemen and then attended by some nurses.
And I'm going to send each and every copy of the patient notes to those hospitals with a little card saying "Compliments of Florey Emergency Department."
posted by Bronze John at 10:09 AM
2 Comments:
But how in God's name did that other hospital sell him to ours as a level four doctor with significant emergency experience when he can't read a chest Xray or an ECG?
There's your answer right there. They wanted to get rid of them so they made them sound wonderful.
Australia's Health Service Crisis in action.
Why is that every other week there comes a tale of such people in this profession?
Could it be that they are underpaid, understaffed, and generally considered disposable like so many other professions?
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