One of those moments

Not a good one though.

I think I take things to heart a little more than the average person. If I do something wrong, something stupid, something I shouldn’t have, or even an accident, it’ll linger with me all day and basically ruin it.

Lately I felt as though I had slowly been becoming more confident in clinic right up until about midday today when I feel like all that gained confidence went out the window. Today had been a unique day in clinic where I got to do a rarely done procedure called Dilation and Irrigation where we basically temporarily enlarge the punctum (drainage ‘hole’ in the eyelid) and insert a device to force saline through. Always a nerve-wracking experience bringing something sharp and pointy close to someone’s eye so having it gone relatively successfully I think is pretty good in my books. I was pretty excited.

Then I had a pretty routine patient, but for some reason I did something stupid… nothing to harm or endanger a patient of course, but I just wasn’t thinking. Of course I got reamed about it and then subsequently about every little thing, even if it wasn’t my fault (we have some attendings who feel as though it’s their right/the best way to educate is to belittle student clinicians/make them feel like shit about everything they do). So nevertheless it bothered me more and more as the day went on. Oh well, there are worse things in life.

It brings me to a thought though, about how part of me would like to teach at some point in my life. As I go through the last parts of my clinical education, I’ve picked up on things that work and don’t work from the student perspective. I feel like the older the educator is the worse they are at educating, at least for the most part (there are some exceptions, including one professor who I have to admit being my source for wanting to teach – albeit, he acts pretty young for his age… which isn’t that old.). Younger newer doctors seem to relate more to the students and are far more encouraging and receptive to what students need to learn. Older doctors seem to go with the, “You didn’t do this right, time to pull off the belt.” approach. This may have worked in the 60′s when child abuse was hunkey-dorey (I’m making this statistic up) but that’s why most of you have probably turned into cynical assholes who don’t know any better than to be negative about everything. I’m sorry your life sucks, maybe you should do something about it. Then of course there are the exceptions of young docs who are just as cynical as the old, but these ‘educators’ as they so-call themselves with their one-day-a-week “preceptor” position whose sole purpose of the shift seems to show all the students how smart they are. No shit. You’ve got 15 years of experience and have seen more patients than we will ever see before we graduate. We’re here with you for you to help us become better clinicians, not be told how stupid or inefficient we are. Sometimes people forget the word “constructive” when they use the term criticism.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve probably learned a lot from any time my attending doctor has reamed me for something I’ve done and hopefully I’ll never do it again, but there are definitely better ways to get people to learn from their mistakes. I guarantee that if you were to poll students, the majority of them will say their best attendings were residents because they not only spend the time to teach you new things and how to look at each case from different perspectives, but because they are genuinely nice people to interact with.

Something every optometrist should be. Not an asshole. And especially not a closet asshole who paints on the happy face in front of their patients… but don’t get me started on that.