The summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school, I worked as an operating room orderly at a hospital. My job title may sound like a great and glamorous position, but, no, it was not. I was basically a janitor, except I swept up bodily emissions instead of dirt. At times, though, I would imagine I was playing an important medical role in a primetime drama about a quirky group of hospital orderlies whose lives are full of humor, excitement and plot-changing realizations. For example:
Doctor 1: My God! There are bodily emissions in this room!
Doctor 2: What about the next patient, scheduled here in three hours?! How will we possibly perform life-saving surgery if the floor is dirty?
Doctor 1 (sadly): If only Chris weren't plot-changingly pregnant. He would know what to do.
Working in an operating room is actually fairly tame. Real hospitals don't have the excitement found on medical TV shows such as "ER." Sure, our hospital did have a wedding between two doctors in which the groom called it off, like in "Grey's Anatomy," and, sure, both doctors were suffering from an incurable and deadly form of scabies and, sure, the husband was disarming a bomb inside of an unfortunate patient while on the altar -- but the couple was not interracial. And it is this kind of crazy plot lines that differentiate written shows from real life.
I did learn a lot about doctors while working there, though. I've found that most people have warped perceptions about practicing medicine. They imagine a tough job that involves large charts with small writing, or small charts with large writing, or large writing that looks like small charts. Most people also view medicine as a stressful field that has you working long nights and holidays, potentially even Arbor Day.
But this negative image is not true. Being a physician involves many fun and exciting activities, most notably malpractice suits. Many people may say, "That's not true, Chris. Are you taking stupid pills? Like, honestly, what's in that bottle over there? That definitely looks like a stupid-pill bottle." These people, however, have obviously never been to a malpractice trial, where doctors take great pleasure in playing practical jokes on people in the courtroom:
Judge: Did you or did you not confuse a scalpel with your scrub pants?
Doctor: Mr. Judge, if you let me go, I won't diagnose you with cancer.
Judge: Hmm, you know, I don't like cancer, so deal accepted.
Lawyer: Objection! He used scrubs as a scalpel!
Doctor: And for that, Mr. Lawyer, you now have lupus.
Now, of course, doctors cannot randomly give people diseases. What they do, instead, is "prescribe" them. This is a fancy word that permits doctors to write unintelligible words on small sheets of paper. For all I know, they are writing out dialogue from "Murder, She Wrote" episodes, but the patient would never be able to tell. The problem with this idea is that most "Murder, She Wrote" episodes do not contain the word "Prozac," and yet pharmacists usually fill the correct bottle, although not necessarily with the correct pills.
So there must be some way to tell what a prescription says. What pharmacists probably do is convene and discuss what they think the doctor wrote. This is why there are so many pharmacists behind the counter, when one would think putting pills in bottles would only take one, maybe one and a half, people. Here's how I imagine the pharmacy meetings:
Pharmacist 1: What does this say?
Pharmacist 2: Um, one order of "no more jumping on the bed?"
Pharmacist 3: No, it says six orders of Prozac.
Pharmacist 4: Actually, that's just toilet paper.
But even though I joke about doctors, they are vital to our society. For instance, the amount of goods they buy for each cancelled wedding is the reason we are currently in a period of economic prosperity. So, please, if you ever find yourself among a group of doctors, stand up, thank them and quickly sprint away before they prescribe you lupus.
Chris's column runs weekly Mondays. He can be reached at shuptrine@cavalierdaily.com.
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