On hot gossiping with the surgeons

Throughout my several weeks experience of being a full time clinical student, I've sat with several different teams in the hospital. I've sat with the general surgeons, ENT surgeons, vascular surgeons, anesthetists and radiologists. 

And sometimes quite inevitably, you're drawn into the slimy gossiping session between members of a group although you were there just for a 2 hour session and all you do is sit around hoping to be invisible so no one would ask you questions that the answers to you knew, back when you were in second year that is.

And many of the times the topic of the discussion would be about how people from other departments are not doing justice to the people talking, who are always either the victims or heroes of the situation.

How the radiologists would have five coffee breaks before tending to your request forms, or how the surgeons always want to cut everything out plus at least one unrelated organ and how they don't know anything about medicine, how medics think too much and complicate matters, how nurses are always unnecessarily bitchy about medicine charts and would ask you to do things with an annoying fake smile, how the psychiatrists are themselves nuts and always act like they're important, when everyone knows that they'd like to be, how the samples you send to the pathologists are never enough to draw a diagnosis from, they usually want the whole organ.

The conclusion from these discussions is almost too predictable. It is: We are right, everyone else is wrong. What we do is the best, everyone else is crap. If we could have it our way, all the patients would be better looked after and everyone, ranging from the crappy people we work with to the people who aren't even born yet would be happier.

 I don't think I'm happy with whats happening here.

Because I've seen how these different people work. I've seen their dedication, their sacrifice, their passion and their efforts. All of them contribute to patient care. All of them are striving to achieve that one goal up there, to make sure the patients are, at the end of the day better than when they came in.

I'd take the risk of sounding naive and ask; isn't that what we all want?

So instead us saying "what you guys do don't work, and we know this because we've had training for years on end in what we do and we see no other way that would work best save ours and so, screw everyone else, come, join us, become one of us because when everyone is in our group, all the patients in this world would be healthier and happier"; maybe we should embrace each other and say "Thank you! Thank you for tending to the people whom I cannot reach out to, the people whom I cannot understand and cannot stand to be in the presence with, thank you for doing something that I don't think I'm capable of doing, things that I lack the skills to do, thank you for going further than I can, or closer than I can, thank you for speaking different lingos, thank you for understanding things in a different way because only then can we compare ourselves and see our mistakes. And most of all, thank you for trying to achieve what I too am trying to achieve."

That's life isn't it? We'd love to think what we do is best, but we should know that this world is quite like a hospital. There are young sick people, old sick people, teeny weeny sick people, bleeding people, people with cancer, people with colds and coughs, people who have 'pathological' thinking, people with inherited diseases, people who brought their diseases on to themselves, people who don't want to be treated, people who are difficult, people who are simply...different. Different from each other and thus need different treatments. And so there are the medics who play with drugs, surgeons with their knives, psychiatrists with their words, nurses with their hands, radiologists with their films, anesthetists with their happy serums and security with their 'guns'.

This is an absolutely personal opinion, and I would admit to it being totally arguable and flawed, but I'd like to shout it out anyways.

Instead of putting too much effort in debating who's best, we may all benefit more by actually thinking about getting to the goal together. And if people think that they like to do things in a certain way, the way they can be most comfortable in, taking a slightly different path, instead of condemning their understanding and efforts and saying what they are doing is suboptimal, maybe we should give them a pat on the back and say "hey, if you think you're comfortable with that, go for it! Coz God knows, I don't think I want to do that, so it's good that you are willing to do so.  As long as you're getting there."

They are working hard already to do what they are doing, they deserve to at least be happy with it.

"Allah x tgk result dia Allah tgk usaha kita snanye" (A friend of a friend of a friend...blablabla, date unknown) 


In support of choices and happiness
Azfar