(no subject)
Dear ER doc who shall remain nameless,
Although this may come to a surprise to you after doing 4 years of medical school, 3 years of residency, a year of fellowship, and being in practice for 5+ years, but there actually IS a difference between a patient who is dehydrated and one that is coughing up blood. Please do not mistake one condition for the other in the future, especially next time that you page me at home at 7:30AM on my morning off when I am NOT on-call. Whereas it would have been my pleasure to come in and assess a dehydrated chemotherapy patient, I certainly did NOT have the time necessary this morning to assess and order a full work-up on a patient who could be having anything from generalized mets to a PE (that's pulmonary embolism, or blood clot in the lungs since you don't appear to understand medical terms correctly). I had my half-day back with my family medicine preceptor today, a fact which I pointed out to you when you paged me. You might want to send an apology to my preceptor as you being a dimwit meant that I was an hour late for my other commitment.
The basic premise of my letter to you, since I doubt that you will ever understand anything too complicated is: piss off!
Sincerely,
Your friendly neighbourhood internal medicine resident who was not on-call last night and does not like to deal with people coughing up blood when all that you said was wrong with them was a lack of fluids.
P.S. No worries, a second letter will be sent to my internal medicine preceptor who should know that on half-days back, not only am I not responsible to see patients, but he also cannot simply dump them on me because he would prefer not to drive in the snow to the hospital this early in the morning.
Although this may come to a surprise to you after doing 4 years of medical school, 3 years of residency, a year of fellowship, and being in practice for 5+ years, but there actually IS a difference between a patient who is dehydrated and one that is coughing up blood. Please do not mistake one condition for the other in the future, especially next time that you page me at home at 7:30AM on my morning off when I am NOT on-call. Whereas it would have been my pleasure to come in and assess a dehydrated chemotherapy patient, I certainly did NOT have the time necessary this morning to assess and order a full work-up on a patient who could be having anything from generalized mets to a PE (that's pulmonary embolism, or blood clot in the lungs since you don't appear to understand medical terms correctly). I had my half-day back with my family medicine preceptor today, a fact which I pointed out to you when you paged me. You might want to send an apology to my preceptor as you being a dimwit meant that I was an hour late for my other commitment.
The basic premise of my letter to you, since I doubt that you will ever understand anything too complicated is: piss off!
Sincerely,
Your friendly neighbourhood internal medicine resident who was not on-call last night and does not like to deal with people coughing up blood when all that you said was wrong with them was a lack of fluids.
P.S. No worries, a second letter will be sent to my internal medicine preceptor who should know that on half-days back, not only am I not responsible to see patients, but he also cannot simply dump them on me because he would prefer not to drive in the snow to the hospital this early in the morning.