So I called HO A. He apologized and told me that he would be late due to car problems.. Fair enough., good enough a reason. But I still gave him a piece of mind for not informing us, his colleagues and I even did that on our department whatsapp group (of course our whatsapp group only consists of ho, no mo or specialist in it).
Then I called HO B. No one picked up the phone. I whatsapp her in our group chat again but no reply . I guess she isn't in our group chat. And she didn have the courtesy to inform that she wasn't coming to work. Even when she came to work today, she just acted as if nothing happened. I mean come on, where is your sense of responsibility and teamwork. No respect for your colleagues.
And the weird thing is Ho A actually called B to tell her he ll be late and she just said okay. And then she herself didn come to work. I mean why the hell would you say okay when you are planning not to come to work. Really cannot fathom what is in these people s minds.
Later on in the day, HO A went to read a venous blood gas for a patient and I was wondering an hour later why he didn come to show us the results. I was thinking that the result must be normal. Since he is a first poster, I went and checked the vbg result just to make sure it was okay. I got a shock. The vbg shows severe metabolic acidosis with a ph of 7.22 and a HCO3 of 8! We took the vbg because the patient s blood sugar was very high and we were worried of diabetic ketoacidosis.
I realized that that result doesn correlate with the patient clinically as the patient was very well and comfortable and no symptoms of DKA. It was either the abg machine was faulty which is something very common in our hospital or that the result doesn belong to the patient.
What angered me the most was that HO A failed to see the significane of the terrible vbg results. If that is really the result of a patient we would have to intubAte the patient immediately. I called him and half shouted at him. For not recognizing the severity of such a vbg result. For not recognizing that it must have been an inaccurate result for that patient. For failing to at least ask us or show us the results and simply just leave the results in the case note without doing anything.
As expected it turns out he doesn't know how to interpret a blood gas result. I cooled down after that and sat him down and taught him slowly how to interpret blood gas results. I even turned the oxford handbook page to the acid base balance chapter and asked him to read. And guess what he said?
"Eunice I have 2 of these books in my car but I cannot read la.. I just cannot.."
Me: Why cannot read?
HO A: Arrr..aiya.. My English is not very good.. I cannot read la.
I really hope he takes an effort to improve and learn. If not, his nonchalance and ignorance and irresponsibility are going to cost many lives.
Another incident that sparked off my anger .. Yes, I m not done yet.. I found out 2 of my patients' specimen, one was a blood specimen and another was a specimen from the patient's abdominal drain, weren't sent to the lab since Thursday. We kept tracing the results and just couldn't get the results. We collected the patient s abdominal drain for 4 consecutive days because of that. And I found out that all the specimens were still in the ward and not sent. I just flipped. I saw a ppk and just complained to her.
Aiyo.. All these may seem like trivial matters but they angered me a lot. I just don't understand why people can work like tHat. They just can't be bothered. Stressed betul working with such people.
And perhaps the PMS is also another contributing factor for my short fuse.
