A few days ago, as I was leaving work, one of the paramedics shouted out, "And where do you think you're going?" I responded, "To bed! My shift is over! You don't pay me enough to keep me here!" She laughed and I went on my way.
As I walked into my room, though, I was feeling so unsettled I stopped dead in the doorway to ask myself what was wrong. It took a bit of searching but I finally figured out it was that parting remark that so aggravated my conscience. It's not that it was a particularly mean or rude response. It fit the conversation. The problem is that I didn't mean it.
I would say that if left to myself, it's fairly hard to get me mad or move me to cynicism when it comes to patients. I don't get stressed out by high patient loads; I just start chugging away at the list. I'm not likely to get dramatic about bad smells or low IQs or nasty feet. I would say my professional demeanor is fairly warm and unruffled. But if I have one flaw that I have struggled with consistently throughout
medical school, it is that I am easily influenced by negativity specifically. It's
quite a weakness when you think about it. It means that when people around me are stressed, irritated, bitter, burnt out, or just being big bloody divas, I often get caught up in it even if that's not how I would feel if left to myself. It's actually terrible. I'm ashamed of it to the point that I almost didn't write this post.
The night this happened, everyone else had spent the shift irritated with how busy the ER had been. I'd been enjoying myself for the most part, but conversation centered around, "AGH why won't people stop coming in" and "Someone shoot me now" and "I can't wait to get out of here. CAN'T WAIT." I think I soaked that up and gave it right back, which is so dumb. And it's even more dumb because I believe all of that was just crap. Just talk. The people I'm working with like their jobs, so why the pissed off chit-chat?
God is keeping me on this planet to be a light to others - to be a living example of the transformative power, the freedom and joy, of walking with Christ. And yet, I struggle daily against what is essentially the pack mentality, emotional peer pressure, assimilation by the Borg. And among medical people, the collective mindset is quite frankly poisonous. It's critical, irritable, jaded, sarcastic almost to the point of viciousness, hardhearted, and unhappy. It has dehumanizing them-vs.-us undertones, where patients are the opposing team. Logically I get it; this is the underbelly of the mental pickiness necessary to be good at medicine and the distance we have to maintain so we can see sad/ traumatic things every day. But that does not make it okay.
Another giant problem that arises in medicine concerns gossip. I know everyone everywhere struggles with it. But medicine is one of the few places I can think of besides police work where your work is directly concerned with people's dirty secrets (and also just their general dirtiness). That means the line between sharing information and gossip is even thinner, and most medical personnel I've met don't even try to walk it because the information is so juicy. Conversations segue straight from, "So her exam was pretty normal despite her insistence that she was in pain," to, "She was such a jerk to me! And she smelled! And did you see her teeth? Ew!" The issue is that pain, combativeness, malodorousness, and poor dentition can all be appropriate parts of a discussion regarding medical care, but they can all also be poisonous gossip that hurts not only the patient, but the gossiper.
I don't know exactly how to handle that yet. In college I got pretty good at asking people to stop gossiping around me, but that was when I worked in retail, where it was blatantly obvious that we had no business discussing such things. In medicine it can be difficult to pin people down, and as humans we will always get defensive when our sins are pointed out to us. I wonder if it will be easier for me when I am a doctor and thus have some official and some unofficial authority; I've seen how often the doctor unconsciously sets the working atmosphere. At the same time, though, I know that the Lord does not rely on earthly authority when it comes to people keeping each other righteous. I technically have all the authority I need right now.
I just need to let Christ make me bold about what is true.
