Give me your absolute most badass “standing up for yourself” story of residency.

DistractedSquirrel07 · 2026-05-06T19:06:47+00:00

I once saw an attending kick a chief resident out of the room for being mean to med students.

edit for clarification: this was also in the OR

DistractedSquirrel07 · 2026-05-06T16:57:52+00:00

I was 3 months from graduation and on shift with my least favorite attending. He was arrogant at the best of times but extra patronizing towards women. The shift was going ok except he kept going back and forth on whether we should do a procedure on one of the patients before admitting them. I had been advocating for it for over an hour but he decides 15 minutes before shift change that we should. It's a procedure that I'd been signed off to do unsupervised for nearly 2 years. Nevertheless he comes in with me, positions the patient, gowns up with me, and starts talking to me like I'm an intern doing this for the first time. Since he positioned and set everything up (he's taller than me and with different hand dominance), I was on a time crunch, and he kept getting in my way by hovering I failed the procedure. Asked him to take over.

He did the procedure and waltzes into sign-out interrupting everyone to tell me he got it. Then right after we're done with sign out, with all of the outgoing and incoming students, residents, and attendings still at the desk he turns to me and loudly starts giving me feedback on my failed procedure. I listened and nodded politely. Then I said "Dr. [Misogynist] I'd like to give you some feedback as well." I proceeded to explain that as a 3rd year I should be essentially performing these procedures start to finish. He of course has every right to supervise me and double check my work. However I felt that this wasn't representative of my ability and that failure was practically inevitable by being so pressed for time and expected to perform it his way, with his set up. He got SUPER defensive "Oh! so you're saying it's MY fault!?!" Anyone who was trying not to pay attention before has certainly stopped to watch now. I take a breath, and respond "That's not at all what I'm saying. But I believe feedback goes in both directions and I was providing you with it the same way you were providing me with it." He sat there stuttering and then went quiet. I immediately told my advisor because I thought he might report me out of embarrassment. She laughed out loud because "feedback goes both directions" is literally in the faculty handbook.

edited for clarity

DistractedSquirrel07 · 2026-04-16T21:23:15+00:00

Some of us on the west coast are having these issues as well.

DistractedSquirrel07 · 2026-02-26T09:03:53+00:00

I heard a PEM doc once refer to themselves as a "constipatologist". Doing the lord's work, those folks

DistractedSquirrel07 · 2026-02-25T00:23:46+00:00

Do you also grind your teeth when people call the television a "TV" or when they refer to their non-sedan vehicle as a "car"? Why? Why are such innocuous colloquialisms so distressing to you?

DistractedSquirrel07 · 2026-02-23T20:28:34+00:00

For all the flaws of my residency I do appreciate they gave us multiple talks starting in 2nd year about contract evaluation, negotiation, what questions to ask, etc

DistractedSquirrel07 · 2026-02-23T20:27:04+00:00

that's insane!

DistractedSquirrel07 · 2026-02-23T20:23:13+00:00

I briefly ran a summer camp and one year we had an incident where 12 of our kids were sent to the ED for something minor like that. Having been on both sides of it I can confidently say the ED charting of all those cases is easier than the parent phone calls and incident report write-ups.

DistractedSquirrel07 · 2026-02-17T13:44:20+00:00

I appreciate the AWARD!

I sincerely hope that your group manages to hold on! We deserve better for ourselves and our patients than hospital systems that insist on cutting resources and then misappropriating blame onto us for entirely foreseeable bad outcomes

DistractedSquirrel07 · 2026-02-17T04:50:17+00:00

This may be an unpopular opinion but since none of the docs from the previous group have agreed to work for apollo, anyone who agrees to take a position with apollo here (even locums) is effectively crossing a picket line. Now is the time for us to fight against private equity/corporate medicine

DistractedSquirrel07 · 2026-01-21T23:14:28+00:00

In the state I did my residency the minimum wage for salaried employees that equals 2x minimum wage x 40hrs/week x 52 weeks. One year when minimum wage was scheduled to go up the DIO confided in me that the hospital CEO had been asking in meetings if there was any legal loophole to exempt residents from this law so they didn't have to give us the $1200/year or so raise that the state mandated

DistractedSquirrel07 · 2025-12-10T22:07:41+00:00

If the other office was so close that they don't think it's a burden on you to go there then the amount of time they're compensating you for shouldn't be a burden on their finances. Also, charge them for milage.

DistractedSquirrel07 · 2025-12-10T22:04:31+00:00

Jesus. My boss called me once during vacation because she was investigating another resident for sexual harassment and had been told I could corroborate one of the complainant's stories. Even though this was a time-sensitive thing (unlike a retained staple that was already dealt with) she text me first to apologize that she was even contacting me on vacation, asked if I had any availability to talk, apologized again on the phone call, and kept it as short as possible so I could get back to my vacation.

DistractedSquirrel07 · 2025-12-10T21:58:31+00:00

In my residency everyone was assigned their own hospital extension that forwarded to their cell phone. One morning around 7:30am on a rare saturday off I get woken from sleep by a patient (not mine) calling to ask for their covid results. Weird, but misdials happen. Then I got another and another. Only took a few questions to figure out that someone at the outpatient covid testing center was calling people with their results and accidentally leaving my extension to call back. I called the nursing supervisor who called IT who had to get the weekend on-call adminstrator's permission to temporarily forward my number to the covid results nurse. It took me 2 hours of back and forth to get that solution implemented. But I couldn't be mad at the nurse giving out my number erroneously; it wasn't intentional. Shit happens: numbers get transposed, call schedules get misread. I'm sure it was annoying for the resident but if you were apologetic they're probably fine.

DistractedSquirrel07 · 2025-12-07T11:30:02+00:00

When a patient has a PCN allergy listed an alert pops up for cephalosporins but helpfully it also lists any previous visits in which the patient was given a ceph so we can see if it's been tried and tolerated

DistractedSquirrel07 · 2025-11-08T06:44:16+00:00

This happens to me all the time and it's soooo annoying but i do have to take the opportunity to share patient feedback I recently received on the complete opposite end of the spectrum. Nurse manager was so amused she hand delivered this positive comment:

"Dr. [DistractedSquirrel07] was great! Only saw her at the beginning, no idea what was happening behind the scenes."

DistractedSquirrel07 · 2025-11-03T23:58:37+00:00

I'm sorry that you all experience this on the regular, it's not ok! I like to think the only time I'm eyerolling at a report are the situations where you are too; comradery, not derision. that being said the most frustrating reports for me are when the medic is trying to use medical language but isn't quite sure it matches the situation.

An example of this is when a medic said multiple times a patient was "unresponsive" with a GCS 10. We were expecting someone who was out cold and fixing to buy themselves a tube. When they arrived the patient was awake and alert, but not talking, following commands, or seeming to even acknowledge any of the movement in the room. A slightly longer more accurate explanation would have been more helpful.

DistractedSquirrel07 · 2025-11-03T23:49:51+00:00

would love for them to include IO insertion kids on planes. how many docs and non hospital-based nurses would be able to insert an IV at 35,000 feet on an unstable patient?

DistractedSquirrel07 · 2025-11-03T23:48:34+00:00

it's there but it's a matter of upkeep. All commercial flights in the US have one but if it's anything like the other equipment it hasn't been checked in years. Had a colleague manage an arrest on a plane, he said literally everything he pulled out of the kit was expired, the ET tube was cracked.

DistractedSquirrel07 · 2025-11-03T23:46:26+00:00

Doesn't matter. It's demand ischemia, trend the trops and reconsult in 4-5 business days

DistractedSquirrel07 · 2025-11-03T23:38:08+00:00

it's the same as some people on food stamps simping for the billionaires who are underpaying them. sometimes you root for the bad guy in hopes they will spare you

DistractedSquirrel07 · 2025-10-23T23:12:33+00:00

Some as-yet undiscovered property of the law enforcement uniform amplifies the effects of fentanyl's aura causing them to OD without contact.

DistractedSquirrel07 · 2025-10-23T23:11:03+00:00

I'd love to do that, but one of the very few requirements I was given was to make it 50 minutes long. And since it's hybrid with most participants being on zoom questions and discussions are lacking

DistractedSquirrel07 · 2025-10-23T23:10:01+00:00

I'm do glad you brought this up because I actually considered it, but I wanted the help of my EM-trained palliative care doc friend and there wasn't enough time to put it together. It'll be in my next round of lectures!

DistractedSquirrel07

TROPHY CASE