Whatever Works

It’s February. It’s freezing out (high of 32 here today). It’s cold and flu season. So people are getting sick and they’re coming in mass to my ER, where many are getting admitted to the hospital with things like pneumonia. The other weekend between the other ER doctor and myself, I think we admitted 20 patients to the same on-call internist. I was working overnight and I swear I called this poor doc every 2 hours all night long, and he was remarkably gracious about it.

I had heard some of the other ER docs complain that this internist and some of his colleagues can be difficult when you call them for an admission. This is not entirely uncharacteristic of internists… There is a constant war of wills between ER docs and internists – We call them to admit patients and they get annoyed because they don’t always agree with our plan and instead think the patient can go home, etc., etc. BUT they are not the ones at the bedside and can’t really make that call over the phone from the comfort of their couch, so they have to either get off their ass and come in to see the patient or give telephone orders for admission and then suck it up and take charge of the patient’s care upstairs. So you can imagine that sometimes they are not too fond of us, since we create a lot of work for them. Although, on the flip side, they are the ones sending us all the patients who call them with anything that might sound remotely concerning… basically when they get too busy to see their own patients they tell them on the phone, "Just go to the ER." So it works both ways. But you can imagine it could be grounds for some conflict every now and then.

One thing I like about where I work is that, personally, I’ve found the group of internists to be very agreeable. They seldom give ME a hard time about admitting patients. I joke that I could call some of them and say, "I’m sending a young healthy person with a hangnail to the ICU," and they’d respond "Sure, Dr. So&So."

So the other night I wasn’t too terribly surprised when this poor internist that I was hammering was so gracious. I felt bad about torturing him all night with admissions, but it was just one of those shifts when everyone was sick. The next morning one of the nurses was teasing him: "Dr. Mo, What are you trying to do? Admit the whole town?"

His response maybe explains some of the reason I don’t seem to encounter too much resistance when it comes to admissions. I wasn’t there for the comment, but the nurse passed it on to me the next time I saw her. He answered: "It’s Dr. So&So. She’s so damn cute, I just can’t say 'No'!"

Hey, cuteness isn’t at the top of the list of what is supposed to make a good doctor, but if my cuteness helps get my patients admitted when they need to be, I’ll take it.