Monday, January 11, 2010

Something I wish I had said but am glad I didn't

Part of being department chief is dealing with complaints about your colleagues and "disciplining them". I seemed to spend a lot of time in the principal's office at the CofE but in my new job have avoided that. (Different principal, different school)

Our chief recently had to deal with the following complaint:

One of our anaes. was assessing a patient pre-operatively. As are many of our patients nowadays, this patient was morbidly obese. On top of this he had a small mouth. My colleague thought out loud, a little bit too loudly, "With a mouth that small, how did you manage to get so many cheeseburgers in?"

I might have accepted a trip to the principal's office just to have said that.

1 comment:

burnttoast said...

As we age, our frontal lobe, the part of the brain that contains impulse control and other higher functions, withers. This means sometimes we say what we would have just thought 20 years ago. For example, today I was fussing at a patient for continuing to smoke despite an FEV1 of 40% predicted. I asked him if he were planning to smoke until it got to zero. He started joking around, and as part of his defense he offered the fact that he had been married 9 times. "So you're telling me you're not very smart?" came out of my mouth with no screening whatsoever. His brother almost fell out of his chair he was laughing so hard! Luckily we were all laughing.