What Residency Looks Like XXXI: Second-Year Blooper Edition

I have a tradition of sharing bloopers from my clinical training in the summer (for old links see below). This time is no different. I just completed my second year of combined Internal Medicine and Pediatrics residency. I started in the pediatric emergency department and ended in the adult ED. In between I went to the juvenile detention center, saw infectious disease and neurology consults, spent a month improving my teaching skills, rounded in both the pediatric and adult intensive care units, and took care of patients of all ages in clinic and in the hospital. I share these lighter moments as a reminder that we are all human, and humans have the propensity to say or do some funny things sometimes.

Gordy Orange got his head scanned.

Resident Bloopers

10. Every time I had a 24-hour (or longer!) shift and forgot to turn off my bedside alarm. (Sorry, Dear Husband!)

9. The morning I had to run back to the house to retrieve the expensive reflex hammer I had accidentally dropped in the garbage can with the bag of trash I was taking out.

8. The time a clinic patient asked me if I had sent her prescription to the pharmacy and I replied, "Oh shit, sorry, I forgot" in front of the 5-year-old girl she was babysitting and had brought with her.

7. When I tried to make a joke but got the punchline wrong:

Me: I have the patients in rooms 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Full house: I win!
Attending: That's a straight.
Fellow: Have you ever played poker before?
Me: Once?

6. That night shift when I followed my sign-out instructions and paged the special pharmacist, at home, at 3:30 in the morning, about a medication that didn’t need to be given until 11:30am.



"Smarty Pants"

5. The day in clinic I tried to order a medication (Depo Provera) to the pharmacy but only succeeded in placing the nursing order to have it given. The attending ordered the medication, so I deleted the nursing order. The attending wondered why it was taking so long for the patient to get the medication, and only much later did the nurse come back to ask why I had deleted the administration order, and did I still want the patient to receive the medication she had picked up from the pharmacy?

4. The morning I spent a frantic fifteen minutes looking for my hospital badge in our house and both cars before realizing...I was wearing it on my sweater underneath all my winter gear.

3. When I was seeing a gentleman in the ED who was complaining of pain when he peed and he yelled when I palpated his scrotum. I asked if it hurt there and he replied, "No, but you touched my kids. That's what I call them, 'the kids.'" He wasn't having pain there, he was just surprised.

2. The time in the pediatric emergency room that I guessed that the mother of a newborn baby with jaundice was East Asian and included that as a risk factor on the discharge paperwork I gave them and the father asked me, "Who told you the baby was Asian...?"

1. Once, in the middle of re-sewing a large-bore IV in the ICU, I realized that the suture I had grabbed from the supply room was attached to a straight, 3-inch needle. I had to stand there holding gauze over the opening in the patient's neck while Central Supply sent up suture packets with curved needles. For some reason they only stock straight needles in the unit, so it's not like I had grabbed the wrong package. I have never used a straight needle to place stitches on a human being before and didn't even realize this was a way in which I could screw up. And if that doesn't sum up the ridiculousness of residency, I don't know what does.

Wellness Week = Karaoke

Editor's Note: Nostalgic or new readers can look back on Med School Bloopers 1 and 2, as well as Intern Bloopers.

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