With those thoughts in mind, I have to thank one of our residents (we'll call him Roy G. Biv, MD) for allaying some of my fears. To be fair, Roy's a very smart guy, a very nice guy, and a good doctor. He just cannot function in the ED, which is unfortunate given that he is completing a residency in emergency medicine. Easily overwhelmed, Roy tends to get flustered quite easily.
So I'm assuming it was the stress of juggling multiple patients, and not temporary color blindness, that prompted him to open the IV cart, remove on of the blood tubes, walk over to me, place the tube in front of my face and ask:
"Is this a blue top tube?"
Yes, there are several colors of tubes to choose from, but we're not talking about a Crayola box of 120 crayons. I could have been a smartass and argued that it appeared to be more of a ciel or even robin egg blue, but instead I simply confirmed that the tube was, in fact, blue. As opposed to red, pink, green, light green, gray, or any of the other non-blue-colored tubes we use.
I may be terrified at how much I have to learn going into med school, but at least I have my colors down.
3 comments:
You might have your colors down now but just wait. During our first year vet school every member of my class at some point succeeded at losing simple information and ability to do certain tasks correctly. There was talk of putting the milk in the cupboard and cereal in the fridge, trying to answer a phone call with a calculator and the like. :)
I do that already, so I guess I'm in big trouble!
sure he wasn't color blind?
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