The Falun Gong Show

Every time I switch over to another rotation, there's an adjustment period lasting about 1 week. Switching over to neurosurgery was no different.

I forgot that in the hospital there aren't any lockers for clerks, so I spent the whole day hauling around my tofu container of lunch in an old milk bag. I proceeded, lunch in hand, to orientation where I expected to find out where I was supposed to go and when I needed to be there.

"Neurosurgery? I don't know. You'd better find that out."

Thus concluded my orientation.

So me and my lunch wandered around the hospital, eventually making our way up to the right floor after an hour or so of shrugs and vacant expressions. The surgery for the day had already started so I waited for them to finish before I introduced myself and figured out what was supposed to happen. A few hours later, I got paged to scrub in.

In the surgical suite. I finished scrubbing and came out ready to be gowned, only to end up being told to leave because there were going to be too many people in the OR.

I returned for the next surgery and scrubbed. The nurse told me to scrub again because I didn't scrub long enough, although I scrubbed longer than the surgeon. I scrubbed again. The third scrub for my first surgery.

Gowned and gloved, the operation begun. I was told to "stand over there". I waited for something to happen. Everyone else was standing around the patient, working away steadily. Too far away to see anything, my mind began to wander. I began to get tired. My feet started hurting. Checking the clock, I realized I'd been standing for 2 hours without having seen or done anything. I was also having trouble standing up because I was falling asleep.

I rounded the rest of the day and forgot to sign my name to a bunch of patient charts.

I forgot to contact the resident to let him know I was on call with him that night.

I lost my tofu container somewhere. I hope it turns up.

Someone keeps paging me from all over the hospital but when I call nobody needs me. I think someone's handing out a fake pager number.

I got in a physical altercation with an old demented lady who wouldn't let me look at her surgical incision.

About the time the old lady started trying to gum me to death with her dentureless jaws, I started thinking about how much of a gong show this day was, and how there were so many times when I was really hoping Jaye P Morgan or Rip Taylor would show up and BWONGGGGGGG me out of the hospital.

Several times that day I felt like if somebody had said to me "Just go home." I would have done exactly that with no regrets. That night I was listening to the TV while looking for a new lunch container, and I realized that despite all the mistakes and stupid things that happened, I was pretty lucky. Nobody really cares if I screw up, cause it's my job. Even if somebody cares, there are probably no more than 4 people at any time who notice my particular screw up. It's not like pro sports or real game shows or being a public figure where every move and every fumble is scrutinized the world over by millions of people, videotaped, then shown again the next morning to the billions of people who didn't see it happening live by satellite feed.

The next day ended up being better. The next day always ends up being better.