In the midst of this new frustration, another fear dawned on me: his assistant. In my years of working in medicine, I had come across a few assistants of varying degrees. There were those that sat around looking busy and important but you could never really put your finger on what it was they actually did. They were always on the phone or hogging up the fax machine or diligently bent over their desks filling in insurance forms and saying things like “within my area of expertise” or “our office protocol is as follows.” This breed of assistant was cool with me. They were usually non-threatening and boring and brought their own lunch to work and were nice to everyone.
The slightly more worrisome variant of the assistant was the type that worked alongside the doctor as their medical assistant. Now, you can get a few different versions of this one and here are the two most common. Type one is the caring and kind medical assistant. They ask how you’re doing, how your family is doing. Did you have nice holidays? What do you think of this weather we’re having? Are you feeling alright since the last visit with us? How is your dog? Did your son get out of prison yet? Type one is very concerned about anything and everything and will spend upwards of fifteen minutes preparing the patient for the doctor. This might include bringing the patient some water or running out to the waiting room to get a selection of magazines. It might also include recounting a story about how a relative had the same exact surgery and did just fine darling, she was fine and you’ll be fine too, I promise you! Type one is nice enough but utterly irritating after about ten minutes. Type two on the other hand…
Get ‘em in, get ‘em out. We ask you how you’re feeling on the way into the exam area. We are looking at your problem list three days before you come in so that we can avoid asking questions that might spark a twenty minute long explanation as to how you came about to have your specific ailment. We don’t offer you water unless you’re about to pass out in a coughing fit and we certainly don’t fetch magazines for you either. If you bring your unruly and misbehaved children into the exam room with you, we will not feign friendliness and say how precious they are; in fact, we might even ask them to to leave the room. We are the no-nonsense, no time to be wasted, we don’t care about your second cousin’s brief stint with pre-diabetes that you think you’re susceptible to medical assistants that people either really love or really hate. I say “we” because I am a card-carrying member of this gang and we get shit done. Our doctors love our efficiency and most patients love our shall we say strong willed personalities. They know we will get things done and when you’re talking health and wellness and weather or not you might die, people appreciate efficiency no matter if comes served with a side of “I’m sorry about your second cousin, but I really don’t care.” If I was to be paired with a fellow type-two, things would be just fine. If I was stuck with a type-one, things were not going to end well for him or her.
The third and final group of assistants came in the form of what I liked to call “the pretend doctors.” These were the physician assistants, you know, the people who were just a few credits short of being able to end their signatures with an M and a D. I always wondered about these people. It always seemed to me that they had big ambitions but then gave up when the finish line was in sight. It must be like getting tackled on the one yard line. The golden establishment of being a medical doctor is right there, you can see it and maybe even taste it but then, you don’t get it. You settle. You become a pretend doctor. You posses all the skills and knowledge and know-how but yet, you are not one of them. To me, the whole idea of being in this middle-man position must have been the greatest form of torture. No one will call you doctor and therefore, no one will ever trust you one hundred percent with their health. Sure, they’ll allow you to examine them and look at their blistering rash that supposedly magically appeared out of nowhere, but deep down inside, they don’t trust you or your diagnosis and will be on the phone demanding to speak to the doctor for further advice thirty minutes after they leave the office. These poor people; who in their right mind would ever be a physician’s assistant on purpose? Somebody that is genuinely fucked up in the head, that’s who. Someone who has labeled themselves a noble martyr and will go out of their way to make sure everyone else knows it. They can usually be heard muttering to themselves under their breath such favorites as “I noticed that elevated Sed rate weeks ago” and “I said from the start we should have left that cyst alone.” Passive aggressive is my least favorite color and these poor souls owned sweaters in every available shade of it and wore them on a daily basis like a child wears his favorite batman cape to bed each night.
After tossing my phone onto the bed in childish disgust, I sat there wondering what I was going to do now. I told myself it would be alright and I could still bring my wit and charm to this established surgeon. I bet he had great stories to tell and I could probably pick his brain about the most gruesome surgery he had ever performed. After all, fixing broken bones is a messy and violent job. I bet he had taken a bone fragment to the forehead or something cool along those lines. I wondered if anyone had ever suddenly awakened in the middle of surgery and saw him drilling away at their knee. I wondered if he had ever hit his thumb with the mallet while impacting a prosthesis into place. What would happen if he accidentally broke another bone whilst fixing another? My list of questions grew and with that, my anxiety began to fade and my excitement came back. After spending an entire decade in the fascinating world of internal medicine and lung disease, I was ready for something more exciting than hypertension and less depressing than end-stage lung cancer. I was also thrilled beyond belief that I might never hear anyone mispronounce the drug name Metoprolol again. I mean honestly, just sound it out for crying out loud; Me-to-pro-LOL.
As Monday morning slowly woke up, I lay in my bed awake thinking about this momentous day. The day I would boldly walk into work and show everyone there what I was made of. I wasn’t some lowly new girl who was going to teeter around asking dumb questions and making captain obvious-level observations. I was going to hit the floor running and amaze everyone. I would be the talk of the office and by lunch time and everyone would want to sit by me and hear about my past adventures in medicine. I would dazzle them with stories about how I used to heroically pull foreign bodies out of people’s ears or maybe I should open with the story of that one time I had to assist the doctor with a beautifully infected wound by holding the emesis basin so he could collect the copius amount of green sticky fluid that was draining out of said wound. There was also the incident involving myself, the EKG machine and a patient with rather large breasts that might be a good opener, you know, so everyone knew that not only was I intelligent and experienced but also quite funny and likeable. First impressions are everything, right? With this thought in mind, I proceeded to get ready for my big first day; I absolutely could not wait to meet this surgeon and his assistant. Naturally, I was most curious about this mystery assistant. I had to be prepared to out do him or her without coming off as a know it all. Part of me wanted to be a nice team player but the other half of me wanted these people to feel secure in knowing they had not hired a dummy and I could hold my own and get things done. I had left my previous employer in such good standing and was eager to continue on my own tradition of kicking ass and taking names.
This of course, started off with looking the part. I had been informed that traditional scrubs were not part of this particular office’s dress code. They preferred a “professional” looking staff and as I feigned excitement over this, my brain had already gone into panic mode about what I was going to wear. I owned exactly thousands of scrubs. Some were cute, some were boring, some were threadbare but most importantly, all of them were comfortable. You see, wearing scrubs like wearing pajamas. In fact, you’re basically wearing pajamas to work. When you think about it, working in medicine is like a very stressful Saturday morning . You’re sitting there in your comfortable pajamas, sipping coffee at an ungodly hour while your family (co-workers) start shuffling in and complaining about the food in the cafeteria. Keeping with the Saturday morning theme is the entertainment. Instead of cartoons, you get to be entertained by the endless shenanigans of your patients. Always entertaining and rarely boring, patients are forever a staple of our entertainment when it comes to surviving a busy day at the office. Another major survival tactic of hospital life is your scrubs. I mean, they have pockets everywhere; the better to carry secret snacks with you or accidentally take home some extra bandaids or alcohol pads or about eleven pens. Trust me, you don’t want to be caught in the middle of a day of busy patients without something to eat or be without a pen or the always needed but too often forgotten spare pair of exam gloves. Next up on the scrubs rule list is their sheer comfort and functionality. For example, how many times have I had to get on the floor to look at something or…look in to something? How about moving patients? Do you honestly think I want to help lift up a patient of the large variety while wearing high heels and a skirt? I won’t even entertain that question with an answer. Obviously, scrubs provide you freedom to move, good hiding places and, let’s face it, they just look cool. When I was in school, I would purposely wear my scrubs onto the train for my commute home. They were plain blue and after the first few times doing this, I noticed something: people thought I was important! Fellow commuters would offer up their seats to me upon seeing me standing there looking haggard from “surgery.” What a great scam this was! I soon added my stethoscope for dramatic effect and noticed that once again, people were generally nicer to me than most of the other commuters and many a time, I would procure a seat on the train simply because I looked like I was tired from saving so many lives that day. I suppose the fact that my hair was always a mess and I lacked the skills to properly apply makeup only added to my great heist of obtaining a seat on the train in the middle of rush hour. See? Scrubs are awesome. I rest my case.
So now what was I going to do? I peered into my closet and looked at the adult looking clothing I had purchased in the preceding days. I had a nice array of soccer mom dresses, grandma sweaters, middle-age librarian slacks and one too many scarves which I had intended to use as accessories. Right now, my closet looked back at me and said “Well, look at you, working in a professional environment. Aren’t you precious and grown up and boring looking and adult.” Almost begrudgingly, I began to comb through my hangers to put something together. At least color would not be an issue; everything I owned was black. There were one or two gray layering pieces but my years spent living in big cities had taught me something: you will never go wrong with all black, all the time. After a few attempts at looking fashionable, I decided that I was now 47 years old and should have been named Martha because this is exactly what and who I looked like. I took a good long look in my mirror and stood there trying to decide if I should start crying or burn down my apartment so I could use the insurance money to buy better clothes. I had chosen to adorn myself in a simple black cardigan paired with a knee length black skirt that somehow fell lower than my knees giving me that slightly risque Puritan look. To complete my Vogue-worthy ensemble, opaque black tights and solid black heels. I added a simple necklace which consisted of a silver coffee bean shaped pendant that hung from a delicate black ribbon. A dear friend had given me this quirky piece of jewelry after countless afternoons of sharing laughs, cries and everything in-between over bottomless cups of coffee. It was the perfect gift and I felt that somehow, her powerful personality was contained in that little pendant and would help me get along through my first day. I could hear the bean speaking now with her most comforting piece of life advice: “Hey, at least you’re not pregnant!”
Copious Quirks 