I can't say that I really like my outpatient clinic that much yet maybe things will change, but I got a bad vibe going in. I had heard as much from older residents...I believe the quote was, "There is WAY to much estrogen running through that place and that's coming from someone who has estrogen." I honestly don't mind things to much except for one attending in particular, she's a lot like my fourth grade teacher who used to send me to the principles office all the time way back when. She's just really "catty" and aggressive...and you never quite know when she's gonna hit you with it, so you have to be in a constant state of increased awareness...which is exhausting and demoralizing...you think she's being nice, but she's really just lulling you into a false sense of security then...WHAM!!! Even my fellow co-workers have noticed that she doesn't like me...it's really weird, I don't usually rub people the wrong way but when I do, it's like I can't do anything but continue to push them...not necessarily on purpose...it's kinda like when someone tries to grab you and push you off balance, you either fall or you instinctively reach out and grab their arm...simultaneously keeping yourself up and tossing them in the water. Today she was speaking on a particular vaccine. She was speaking about how you couldn't give a particular vaccine after you had administered a totally different treatment for a completely different virus...this on the surface doesn't make sense and I simply asked her to clarify...instead of clarifying she told me to "THINK about it" (not in a nice and non-judgmental tone)...I told her, "if thinking about it would get me an answer then I wouldn't have posed the question in the first place."...she didn't like that response. I finally figured it out, without her help. To multiply the badness, later in an effort to make peace I asked her a question that I figured she would know the answer to. She had been harping on how important it was NOT to get these two very similar vaccines mixed up...she had said, "if you mix up the Tdap and the Dtap vaccines, you will FAIL this rotation." Thinking that this would be an obvious question to pose and one she had to know the answer to, at the end of the lecture, when the teacher asks, "Does anyone have any questions?" I wanted to show her that I had been listening, so I asked this seemingly very simple question. Not because I knew the answer, but because I figured if she were going to beat on something so much, that there must be a very good reason to go on about it. So I asked, "What's the big deal with switching up the Tdap and the Dtap? Does something bad happen?"...in retrospect, it probably looked like I knew what the answer was, because I asked it so pointedly, and I was setting her up to look stupid...but that wasn't my intention...regardless, it worked out that way when she stumbled and looked for help from her fellow attendings (I thought to myself "OH $%@!, here we go...") and I caught a couple of my fellow interns grinning just out of her eyesight....I hope it was out of her eyesight anyway. I haven't found a good way to deal with these types of people yet, my routine when I meet someone that is just constantly irritated by me is to treat them as best you can and try not to get into a tennis match of meanness...sometimes it happens though despite your best efforts and when it does it's another one of those things where you've just got to take it one step at a time.
Newbie-Doc
No comments:
Post a Comment