Lesson 1: How to deal with assholes and overall difficult people: Working at Shitty LLC. it seems like all I ever really deal with are drunks, idiots, assholes and generally hard to deal with douche bags. Usually the drunks are showing off for their friends, or if they’re alone the booze have amplified a shining facet of their personality that makes them oh so fun to deal with. They like to make rude comments, and just be a pain in my ass.
The idiots make me feel like banging my head into a brick wall, or beating them with a foam bat until my itty bitty heart is content (that could be a longggggggg time). Other than annoying me I don’t really mind them since once they leave my coworkers and I mock them. Although drunken idiots are a whole new level and I ALWAYS wish they get stopped for cops for drunk driving.
The assholes and the generally annoying are the ones I hate the most; they have a way of ruining my whole night. Sadly at Shitty LLC. there isn’t much I can do about it but smile and help them as much as I can (without murdering them), I always imagine they’re the types that kick cute little puppies and steal candy from little smiling babies. Douche bags.
My two years at Shitty LLC. has made me realize that I’m not always going to get the awesome patients that you just want to run around bragging about, and that I’m just going to have to grow a pair and deal with them, and not allow my minimal time with them to ruin my shifts (too much anyways). Having annoying, stupid, drunk douche bag patients is part of the game that is medicine, and there isn’t much I can do to change it but to grin, bare it, and later change some facts and talk about it on my blog—like Dr. Grumpy.
On a side note, I will admit that these people cause me to spend about 15% of my shift wondering why in the hell I really want to save people’s lives.
Lesson 2: How to work horrible hours without complaining – much: I work 22 – 6 exclusively, sometimes with little to no sleep at all. I’m sure people doing medical school know how I feel with being up for up to 36 hours at a time, so I look at this as really good training for school. I already know what it is to walk around with an IV of Redbull/Espresso attached to me pumping my body full of caffeine; which sounds about on par with medical school from what I’ve read.
Lesson 3: How to work 8+ hours without a break: The managers at my company are slave drivers, no one on my shift gets a 30 minute break to sit down and relax for a minute, from the minute we walk in we’re usually busy, Shitty LLC. is much busier on the weekends than during the week, so some days we barely get the chance to sit down and have a drink before we’re off and running around like chickens with our heads cut off again.
That’s pretty much how I imagine rotations to be, just go, go, go with little chance to actually sit down and breathe for a minute. The lack of breaks has taught me not to complain, but to deal with it, and to just allow myself to crash when I get home, granted in school you can’t sleep all day, but hey that’s what Redbull is for right?
Lesson 4: Wear comfortable shoes: After 40+ hours a week on my feet without a break my feet tend to kill me, we’re talking walking like a geriatric patient. It’s made me realize the need for a good pair of comfortable shoes, no matter the profession you’re going into. I mean really who really wants to turn into a mega-bitch/dick because your feet feel like someone is ripping the bottoms open with a dull knife? I sure don’t that’s for sure.
Lesson 5: How to say ‘NO’… usually: I’m usually someone that wants to help everyone, or for whatever reason please them. Shitty LLC is slowly teaching me how to tell people ‘Not just no, but hell fucking no!’ Granted once I’m in rotations and residency I can’t actually say no to my superiors, but once I’m established as a physician working (hopefully) in EM somewhere I’ll be able to say no without feeling too badly. Maybe.
There’s a lot more that Shitty LLC. has taught me, but I think those are maybe my top five, any more than these you’ll probably want to shoot me in the head.
