Trust
Being home for the holidays (where damn near everyone in my family is in the medical field), I got my fill of bloody stories that should under no circumstances have been shared over Christmas dinner. It did, however, bring me back to my first college job working in an operating room as a Medical Surgical Technician. Technically, I got the job because I was pre-med, but honestly, I really didn't know what the hell was going on around that place. Highlights of my job included:
• chipping away at an old lady's hip with a chisel and hammer
• getting to wear scrubs
• having patients think that I was the youngest doctor ever
The nasty parts of the job included (but were in no way limited to):
• getting hit in the face with a piece of someone's heart
• having to check that the patients removed all of their piercings
• having to carry amputated limbs (read: full hip to toes) through the hallways of the hospital to the morgue (they were always still warm and only wrapped a sheet and a plastic bag)
The biggest lesson I learned from that job involved the morgue ... which was not a series of nicely ordered drawers like in the movies - but rather one enormous industrial fridge (think: the freezer in the Shining). The lesson was this: Do not trust people that work in morgues. Although they have all-you-can-eat-peanut-brittle and play rock music, they'll lock you in the fridge the first chance they get and play it off as some horrible, horrible, horrible 'initiation' ritual. Ah. This is our Youth.
• chipping away at an old lady's hip with a chisel and hammer
• getting to wear scrubs
• having patients think that I was the youngest doctor ever
The nasty parts of the job included (but were in no way limited to):
• getting hit in the face with a piece of someone's heart
• having to check that the patients removed all of their piercings
• having to carry amputated limbs (read: full hip to toes) through the hallways of the hospital to the morgue (they were always still warm and only wrapped a sheet and a plastic bag)
The biggest lesson I learned from that job involved the morgue ... which was not a series of nicely ordered drawers like in the movies - but rather one enormous industrial fridge (think: the freezer in the Shining). The lesson was this: Do not trust people that work in morgues. Although they have all-you-can-eat-peanut-brittle and play rock music, they'll lock you in the fridge the first chance they get and play it off as some horrible, horrible, horrible 'initiation' ritual. Ah. This is our Youth.
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