Thursday . June 6 . 2002 . 9:50pm (posted 6.7.02) |
anatomy of a white coat With respect to medical personnel in the hospital, you can always tell the level of training by the amount of stuff in their white coat pockets. Interns are completely weighed down by papers, books, blood drawing equipment, pocket medical texts, and morsels of half-eaten food to be consumed whenever a free moment arises. More senior residents still have a few sheets of lengthwise-folded notpaper poking out of their pockets, and may still carry their pharmacopia around, but by an large, they can move a little easier, and only weigh about 3 pounds more than they did when they woke up in the morning. In contrast, the most senior attendings walk around light and airy, with nary an item in their white coats, with the exception of the occasional gold-plated Mont Blanc pen in the chest pocket, or a coiled stethoscope, too rarely used to be draped around the shoulders for the necessity of easy access. I guess the more you have in your brain, the less you need to physically carry around with you. In this light, the medical students are the easiest to spot of them all. Not only are their coat pockets weighed down by all and sundry items that they might need throughout the day, but our white coats are actually shorter, only reaching up to our hips, instead of to the knees like the coats of the actual MDs. We run around all day, short coats flapping, pockets bulging, and try to blend in. Here is an unabridged dissection of what I'm currently carrying with me in my coat. 1.) Lapels. I wear a number of pins on my lapels. On my right lapel is a medical school class pin. The second pin is my nametag, which by law reads, "MICHELLE AU" and underneath. "MEDICAL STUDENT." So we don't go around pretending to be doctors, I suppose. On the left lapel now, the third pin is a penguin pin that I bought during my trip to Japan last summer, with the intention to charm The Kids when I was on Peds, but has somehow had more luck in charming observant adults than anyone else. ("Is that Pingu the Penguin?" asked one woman in active labor.) Finally, below Pingu, I wear a pin with the logo of the university Children's Hospital. That's a lot of pins. 2.) Breast pocket. Two pens, one ballpoint, and one Dr. Grip Gel pen. I find that using a Gel pen takes the sting out of having to write so many notes and charting so many labs, because writing with Gel pens is luscious. One notecard with the template for writing admission orders on the Surgical service. Two paperclips. One safety pin to fasten my engagement ring to my clothing when I have to scrub in. A wad of alcohol pads. One change purse for vending machine worship. A stack of blank sticker labels for lab charting. 3.) Right hip pocket. One stack of articles, to cram in some reading between lectures and pimp sessions where I am summarily humiliated for how little I actually know. One bottle of water to feed my dessicated head. Two tourniquets, which, although they may be the cheapest item we use when drawing blood, are somehow also the most difficult items to locate in the entire hospital. (I filched these two of an anesthesia cart in the PACU.) One pair of cruddy suture scissors for all those occasions that people ask, "does anyone have any scissors?" One pot of lip gloss. Three or four (it's hard to tell) wads of snotted up Kleenex. One mosquito clamp that Joe found somewhere, that I like to open and close just to hear that calming clickity-click noise. Three sticks of Doublemint gum. Sometimes I jam my stethoscope in here, but there's really not that much room to spare. 4.) Left hip pocket. One notepad. Four pocket medical information cards: two on medical Spanish, one on reading EKGs, and one with normal laboratory values. Three butterfly needles for drawing blood. Four vacutainer-butterfly-needle-connector-pieces, also for drawing blood. One copy of the 2001 Sanford Guide to Antimicrobial Therapy, which has a plastic cover that doubles as my wallet. One student lecture schedule, folded into fours. One yellow highlighter, low on ink. One Surgical clerkship logbook, where we're supposed to write down every single procedure we do, every case we scrub into, every lecture we get. For the past few days, I've been forgetting to keep up with the log, and find myself having to reconstruct my daily activities from memory. This is problematic when you haven't really been paying attention. "I scrubbed into that double mastectomy on Monday, didn't I? Or was that an ex lap? I can't remember, I must have been asleep." In the past, I would also carry around such things as a reflex hammer, a tuning fork, an ophthalmo- otoscope set, and other diagnostic stuff like that. But now that I'm on surgery, I don't. People on surgery barely listen to people's hearts unless there's a very, very good reason to. Testing reflexes and looking at eardrums--that just ain't going to happen. My coat probably weighs about 10 pounds right now. No wonder people say they lose weight in medical school. We're lugging around the weight equivalent of one and a half newborn children around in our clothing. (Alternately, it could just be one monstrously huge newborn child. I will call him "Gigantor.") I don't really know what the point of all this was, only that it's made me realize that I carry too much damn stuff around in my pockets. xo Michelle |
