The DR Complex

Alice is my GP. She is stern, smart, forward thinking, knowledgeable, while also having empathy. Now, being a local GP, Alice’s job probably isn't as stressful as those doctors that do ward rounds in a newly opened Hospital, but stress is no excuse for being a cunt. If you don’t have what it takes to do the job with the dignity and empathy it requires, you are in the wrong job. Drs may be smarter than the average bear, but don’t forget that the law of averages still applies, 50% of Drs will graduate in the bottom half of their class. Statistically when there is a normative distribution, and medicine is not immune to the laws of normative distribution, 30% will fall outside of the bell curve. 12.5 % of any group will be shit, 12.5% of any group will be fabulous, and 70% will make up the norm. 2.5% will be superstars, and 2.5% will be breathtakingly incompetent. The expectations applied to the norm will be different in different fields, people expected a Dr to have a better understanding of the human body than a personal trainer, but they expect a personal trainer to have a better understanding of the human body than an accountant. Norms are group specific, and no matter how you spin it, most people are average, 15% are high achievers, and 15% are incompetent. The problem with this is, incompetence in medicine is dangerous. The other problem lies in the 70%ers who think they are top tier superstars. Like ageing silverbacks who have developed myopia and can’t see they are no-longer the kings of the jungle, medicine is populated with a smattering of average old white men who can’t see they are sliding into the bottom 12.5%. The problem is they never thought of themselves as average, and cannot comprehend that they are sliding towards shit faster than a skier taking a tumble on the black run.

Today, within a period of two hours, two medical silverbacks engaged in some chest beating that wouldn’t be out of place in an Attenborough documentary about geriatric apes. My first run in was with a doctor called Cameron Peaman, a very well-known nephrologist. That said, there are only two nephrologists practicing privately on the The Beaches, so the bar for being well known in the field is pretty low. None the less, being a Rockstar in his own head, he felt entitled to treats others like shit. The rules of comedy state that it’s funny to punch up, but no decent person ever punches down. Dr Peaman punches down so hard he’s probably developed a rotator cuff injury from excess wear and tear on the joint.

A mentally disabled patient was admitted to the Hospital, he clearly needed full time care. He was harmless, but he followed around the nurses while they were trying to do rounds, could only communicate by grunting or pointing to things, and was terrified of needles. He was also fixated on my tattoos. After an incident where he ripped the needle out of his arm mid-collection, we only collected his blood when two staff were available. I would hold his arm, and he would attempt to rub the tattoos off my arm. He didn’t seem to understand the pictures were permanent, but it distracted him while we took his blood. One morning he decided spit would do the trick to get rid of the infernal pictures on my arm, so he spat on my arm and doubled down with trying to wipe the tattoos away. Once the blood was collected, I doused my arm in alcohol scrub and thanked my lucky stars that he didn’t have MRSA, so I was unlikely to have contracted anything fatal.

We had to continue this ridiculous charade every day, Dr Peaman insisted on daily blood work and god help anyone who didn’t prioritise his medically unnecessary posturing. Sometimes it took a few attempts but Angela and I always managed to get the blood before midday at least. Sometimes we would have to return several times before we could convince him to allow us to take his blood. It was a lengthy process and one we didn't really have time for. It would probably come as a shock to a narcissist like Peaman, but other doctors were also ordering pathology and expecting results asap. We had had at least another 40 patients that morning.

Most of the doctors don’t even bother to visit their patients, they just request follow up bloods based off previous blood results. They don’t bother to check with the patients if their symptoms have changed, the people aspect of medicine is obviously a downside for many doctors. Then the doctors doing ward rounds order more blood work, so a patient may have 5 separate requests from 5 treating doctors who never consult with each other. One day our tattoo fixated patient refuses to allow us to take his blood, he becomes agitated and violent. We decide to try again later. This is the day that Peaman actually bothers to do his rounds, and he starts the inevitable shit flinging when he finds the bloods have not yet been done. He knows this patient is a difficult man, and because of this has avoided having any contact with him despite being his treating doctor. I have gone above and beyond to get blood from this patient every day for a week. We have developed a rapport with this man, I have let him rub me in a non-happy-ending kind of way on a daily basis for a week. Peaman shrieks and bellows ‘Why haven't you done these bloods!?’ while waving the referral in our faces. Calmly, like when you are dealing with a particularly embarrassing tantruming 2-year-old, I explained that in order to avoid being bitten or receiving a needle stick injury, it sometimes took time to get the patient to consent to the blood test. He had already made a scene and now he was prepared to defend his tantrum no matter what. He waved the referral in my face and said ‘what does that say!?’, pointing to the urgent sticker which I had placed there myself. Without waiting for a reply, he bellowed ‘It says urgent so why hasn't this been done!? what if this was your brother who needed care, would you be happy if this happened to your brother?’ I replied, ‘Speaking of brothers, would you expect your brother to commit medical assault by sticking a needle in someone without their consent, risking being bitten and attacked by a man while trying to do his job?’ He then stormed off in his anger waving the referral around like a broken flamingo, muttering about broken systems and incompetence. I needed to clear my head so Angela got a nurse to help her try to collect the patients’ blood.

Angela assuming that the nurse was more than capable of helping her during the venepuncture procedure, sadly it backfired immediately. I received a call saying the patient had again ripped the needle from his arm, and that they hadn’t managed to collect enough blood for testing. I returned to the ward and let him scrub away at my tattoos so that we could collect the apparently super urgent bloods. Peaman did half-heartedly apologise later to my boss, saying he wasn’t angry with us, just disappointed with the system. Peaman never apologised to me for the way he spoke to me, and the super urgent bloods that caused the tantrum? The results were all normal.

The second incident which occurred not long after the first was with a Dr in the mental health ward. The Hospital procedure for entering the mental health wards, is to enter the ward through the atrium. You must be buzzed in by a staff member. Once we have entered the ward, we are to wheel the trolley with all the needles, alcohol swabs and tubes to the treatment room. We are at all times to be accompanied by another Hermes staff member, always in twos, never alone. We then proceed to the nurse’s station, and a nurse with a duress alarm brings each patient to the treatment room one at a time.

We received an urgent troponin test for a patient up in mental health ward 3B. We followed procedure and entered via the atrium and went straight to the treatment room. In the treatment room was a fat, hairy, slobbery mess of a doctor on a roller chair, with a young blond girl next to him taking notes. We asked him if we could use the treatment room to take urgent bloods for a patient on the ward.

You would think I had just announced I had chlamydia and in the same breath demanded he suck my dick. For years I didn’t understand the phrase ‘palpable rage’ but now I do. His fat arse was in the treatment room and that’s where it was staying. We were standing in the hallway of a locked ward with a trolley full of potential weapons, we were so far outside of protocol we had entered a different time zone. We dumped the trolley in an unlocked consulting room and went to the nurse’s station for help. We told them about the treatment room situation and Dr evil fat hairy face. The lovely nurses on station were furious that the doctor would not allow us to use the treatment to do our job according to Hospital policy.

The nurses told us that most doctors were arrogant pricks. After decades working in mental health and dealing with prick doctors, she held more resentment for doctors than the patients who made a duress alarm necessary. It kind of says it all.

We ended up using a consult room to do the bleed. I don’t understand why we had to break protocol. There were 3 empty consulting rooms Dr fat hairy face could have used, why was he using the only room not set up for him? Why was it more important for him to assert his impotent dominance than to follow the procedures in place to keep us all safe? I will have to deal with this prick for the foreseeable future.

It always seems to be the older doctors that have a problem with staff and nurses. The young doctors are more reasonable and don’t feel the need to posture about.

Should you end up in Hospital with mental health issues, chances are you will be ‘treated’ by a bitter, entitled, jaded old fucker with enough psychological issues to make Freud cum in his pants. So yeah, mental health in Australia is in excellent hands.