BLOG: ‘Are you a doctor?’ again
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
This is the next part of a discussion that is dear to my heart. The first part was posted in spring 2018.
That post opened with this dialogue:
“Are you a doctor?” a woman asked as I entered the store and handed her the basket.
“How did you know I’m a doctor?” I replied.
I was on one of my routine Saturday family errands — trips to the Home Depot, Best Buy, the tailor, the dry cleaner, etc. My hair cut is either on Saturday or Sunday. Saturday is usually the day I run these errands.
I usually leave Sundays to catch up with work. Granted, many professions and jobs behoove people to take home unfished work and work after hours or weekends to catch up.
But for health care providers, this is particularly overwhelming. And, I am not talking about after-hours work, such as being on-call for hospital rounds or for the clinic receiving pages or phone calls from patients.
For health care providers, there is a lot of work to catch up with after hours. With EMR, the work at home never stops. You work on EMR 24-7 except when asleep or in the bathroom. You wake up in early morning — around 4:00 am in my case — or you stay up past midnight — which I can no longer do as I am getting older and need to get to sleep early — to log in, and boy, more and more tasks are in your Inbox, though you had just cleaned it a bit earlier.
So, the above dialogue occurred at the dry cleaner’s store. As I entered, I greeted the lady at the front desk and handed her the basket with the clothes. As she started sorting, she looked at one shirt and then she looked at me, and with a friendly smile she asked me, “Are you a doctor?”
And, surprised, I asked her: “How did you know?”
Clearly, on Saturdays, I wear civilian-casual clothes, usually jeans, I do not carry a stethoscope around my neck, nor do I wear my work badge.
So, how did she know?
Well, she looked at the front pocket of the shirt and found ink stains on the bottom of the pocket. She explained that in her experience, people whose shirts have ink stains on their front pockets are usually doctors!
I laughed, and then she and I talked about how guilty I felt that I damaged some shirts over the years from the ink stains, until I began to develop a strategy of making sure to retract the pen’s ball before returning a pen into my pocket, but still, sometimes I would forget to do that.
That dry cleaner store was closed a few years ago, and so we moved to a different store in our area, and I have not seen that lady since then.
On a recent Saturday errand, I was at Biggby, a popular café in Michigan, for my routine meal: Havarti and turkey on an everything bagel with cheese plus a medium chai late. As I was waiting for my order, a lady approached me.
And with a big smile, she said to me: “Are you the doctor who used to come to the dry cleaner store?”
I immediately recognized her and said, “Yes, with the ink stains on the shirt pocket.”
We chatted about those memories, and I shared with her the original post.
As we parted, I promised her that I would write part 2 of this series, and she said she can’t wait to read it. I told her that I would not mention her name in the story, to protect her privacy, but she said, “No, just go ahead and write my name, I don’t mind at all.” But I will skip that because I did not obtain written consent.
Indeed, this is one of my favorite posts on this blog, which is approaching its seventh anniversary.
Collapse