What Residency Looks Like C: Final Bloopers Edition

Now that I have exited the relatively sheltered realm of training and entered The Real World(TM) of practicing medicine as an attending physician, this will likely be my last bloopers post. Far be it from me to maintain that only medical trainees make funny mistakes--I'm sure every nurse and therapist of any kind has at least one tale of a seasoned physician bungling something that would leave you in stitches. But I have decided to relieve myself, at least for now, of the responsibility of enumerating my own faults (there must be 10 per year, no more, no fewer!). Everyone says the steepest learning curve in medical training is the first year as an attending, when you sometimes look around for "the attendier attending." No doubt for the first couple of years I will continue to feel like a "pre-tending," the term we used for ourselves as senior residents when we ran a service with less supervision than usual. Yet I hope to keep my sense of humor about myself, medicine, and the human body, so if I collect (good) enough anecdotes, I will post them here. For now, it seems right to conclude the series with its 100th post.

Top 10 Bloopers of a Fourth-Year Medical Resident

10. There's the time I made Dear Husband carry my pager: I was on call 24/7 but didn't want to be housebound, so I ventured out to the gym...and forgot my pager. He had to take it on his run just in case it went off! (It didn't.)

9. How about after attending the endocrine fellows' morning lecture, I got myself and an intern stuck in an elevator lobby in one of the fancy research buildings that requires a badge to get in, out, and move around it. We had to call the fellow to stop his elevator on our floor so we could get back on and go to the correct floor.

Last day of 32nd grade!

8. Or when I dropped the rest of my donut on the floor of the residency office, picked it up, ... and after thinking about the three long hours of rounding between me and lunch at noon conference, finished it anyway.

7. Repeatedly diagnosing and treating myself for a skin infection around my mouth that I thought I was contracting from my chapstick, only to finally realize that I had developed contact dermatitis (aka an allergic reaction) to my chapstick (that sometimes damaged the skin so badly that it DID get infected).

6. When I held my hands out to a patient in the hospital and asked her to "Give me a big squeeze," intending that she make a fist around my fingers. Instead, she threw her arms around my neck and hugged me.

5. The morning I got on an elevator after an overnight shift in the emergency room and pressed the button for "1." "You're already on the first floor," said the cafeteria worker in the elevator.

4. When I agreed to cover a resident's patients in clinic so she could travel to see her hubby...I didn't put it on my calendar...and she forgot to remind me...so I didn't know why she hadn't shown up and texted around until it suddenly dawned on me that she wasn't even in the state anymore, much less running very late. I very sheepishly saw her patients.

3. The time I logged in to record my last week of duty hours and discovered 44 requests for faculty evaluations. I had worked a single 10-hour shift in the pediatric emergency room, and rather than ask me with whom I had worked, the residency office sent me a request to evaluate every single attending and fellow in the department.

2. Every resident's nightmare finally came true: I didn't read my schedule correctly and slept in on a Saturday when I was supposed to be starting a 24-hour shift. Thankfully I didn't sleep in that much, realized my mistake when the night resident texted the group WhatsApp, and was ultimately less than an hour late. Good thing the she was understanding; a manslaughter charge wouldn't have stood up in court after making her stay an extra hour after a 12-hour overnight shift.

1. When I offered to heat a patient's homemade "hot pack" made of dried rice in a sock and accidentally put it in the microwave on high for too long, which cooked the rice, which expanded and burned through the sock. The microwave, family kitchen, and my scrubs all smelled like burned rice. I hurriedly turned the end of the sock over the rice that was still in the foot, retied it, and hoped the patient didn't notice...

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