My New Job

This week, I started doing clinical training for my new job (in addition to Bright Horizons) as a medical scribe at an ER near Seattle. The word "scribe" makes it sound like my job should involve a large and fancy quill pen, but alas, it does not (how sweet would that be, seriously?). What a scribe does is follow a doctor around over the course of one of their shifts and do most of their charting for them. The goal of this is to minimize the amount of time the docs have to spend on paperwork and maximize the amount of face-to-face time they can have with their patients (e.g., a doctor who has a scribe can actually sit and listen to a patient's explanation of what's wrong, when their symptoms started, etc., rather than clacking away at the computer the whole time so they don't forget any information that might be important later. I get to clack away at the computer instead).

It's going pretty well, so far. Before I started I was warned that it could be a very fast-paced, hectic job, but clearly the people who warned me about that have never taught preschool. I'm still kind of intimidated by the doctors, not gonna lie. During one of my training shifts, this one doctor called me "Bernice" the entire time, and I couldn't even bring myself to correct him, which was highly amusing to the girl who was training me. I just figured as long as I was making a good impression he could call me whatever he wanted. It's really cool to see the different doctors with their patients, though. In particular, the doctor who calls me Bernice has an amazing bedside manner with kids. He can literally get a screaming, justifiably pissed-off two-year-old with an ear infection to stop crying and sit calmly while he looks in their ears. He does all the regular tricks, like shining the light in his own ears first, so they can see it doesn't hurt, but I've seen other doctors do that without the same effect. It's mostly just something in his personality, or tone of voice, or something else; I don't know what. Talk about a useful skill for a would-be pediatrician . . . if I learn one thing doing this job, I want it to be how he does that.

I like writing HPIs (history of present illness); it's kind of fun jotting down all the random things that a patient says and then trying to form it all into a succinct but informative, professional-sounding summary of why this person is in the ER. And sometimes the reasons are pretty hilarious, which sounds really insensitive, but if you are going to do something like punch a tree and then come to the hospital because the hand you punched the tree with hurts, then I am sorry, but my sensitivity for you is going to be in short supply. That was the funniest thing I've seen in my three shifts at the ER; this dude hurt his hand punching a tree (he was okay, it wasn't broken or anything, I'd feel slightly bad making fun of a guy with a broken hand). I was standing in the room listening to the doctor interviewing the patient and trying not to laugh. I greatly enjoyed writing the sentence "Insert Name Here is an x-year old male who presents with contusion-abrasions and pain in the left hand following a physical altercation with a tree."