Ditch Doc

Senior Medical Resident: (Frowning, feeling elderly demented patient’s chest for abnormal heart findings): “Hmm… yes, she does have a thrill.”

Patient, scoffing: “Well, I’ve had more than that!”

Was I ever glad to hear this, during my recent charting evaluation:
“OK, first of all, we just do these things to pick up the worst of the worst, and, uh, the first thing we look at when we look at notes is, well, are they legible. And yours…(Looks down, flips through a few pages, pauses)…are.”

They audit employees on their use of electronic records. They ask staff to admonish one another for discussing cases in elevators. They forbid the removal from the physical plant of research databases containing patient names. And then they make an overhead page like this: “Would J*** S**** please return to the urgent urology clinic. That’s J*** S**** to urgent urology.”

On the top of Google’s listing for weird emails today:

Dear Father,

Bad news: When I set the tenth Sunday after Pentecost as the first day for the Kinkoriites to sing the Propers, I’d forgotten that my boss is expecting me to attend the World Congress on Thyroid Cancer in Toronto. So I probably can’t make it. I am raking south-western Ontario for a replacement cantor for you. Very sorry for the mess.

In Christo,

Ditch

You know you’re sick when the surgeon tells you that if your couple of cigarettes a day are a small pleasure to you, he won’t ask you to quit.

The best thing about working in a head and neck oncology clinic is meeting patients with missing eyes, throats, ears and even noses, whose voices sound like well-controlled burps, who cough thick mucus from holes in their chests, and who are more visibly cheerful to be alive than I am.