job stress and satisfaction
contrary to what people believe, the medical profession is not a stressful one because of crashing patients that need bed-top CRPs or bleeding/dying patients under the knife of a surgeon, it's the patients +/- families and the administrative/clerical jobs, at least for the JMO.The past few days, i had this especially difficult Chinese man as a patient. Fortunately, my Mandarin has improved so much these days that i could handle it all without an interpreter. But unfortunately, the rest of the team couldn't understand the pain i had to go through. I had to spend hours with him today, at the expense of all my other patients, and he eventually literally walked out on us (I had to run to chase him down the corridor but he was determined to march on). He agreed to an ERCP but refused his pancreatic duct +/- pancrease to be explored, unblocked or touched. He accepted all the risks associated with an ERCP but wouldn't allow me to write down the complications on the consent form. I nearly got into an argument with him about the location of the gallbladder in relation to the liver and at the end i agreed to disagree with him... i won't go on, too much information already.
It's sometimes very harder to sell an ERCP or colonoscopy to a NESB (non-english speaking background) patient. but other times, it's the NESB patients that want their scopes thenandthere. the other day, a patient offered us cash to buy himself 1 unit further of packed cells for transfusion, when we told him his blood counts wasn't bad enough to warrant another bag.
Other times, it's the challenge of finding the write person for a referral, tracking down the correct laboratory to do a rare test on some stools, getting to hear the magical words "Ok, i'll see him. what's his MRN?", convincing the registrar to cancel a consult, fighting for a computer to use, correctly estimating how long someone's putting you on hold so that you can make another call (on another phone) the meantime, finding some chocolates in the drug-room so that your stomach has something else to chew on instead of itself.
And when any of the above is achieved, it's a great joy indeed!!!
posted by zhinger @ 10:06 pm
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