| so i was at this career day thing for high school students. its part of the "pipeline"-- trying to get kinds from the neighborhoods we serve (read: poor neighborhoods, underserved, undersupplied, under-everything) to go to medical school (or nursing school, or optometry, or psycology, or, really, just to go to college at all). "pipeline" projects, community gardens, school clinics, public health promotoras-- these are a big deal to our program. being an intern, i'm stuck in the hospital way too much to be in on most of this stuff, but you can at least see the pattern-- trying to be involved in the neighborhood rather than commuting in and heading right back out again like the tide. |
| i'm not really sure why i was there. i think it was so they could see a doctor up close outside the exam room, see them as a person, someone who went to public school, someone from a working class family, from a neighborhood they'd recognize. i was supposed to introduce the speaker, who would talk about financial aid, and then tell the speaker when there was five minutes left.
she was a graduate of their high school, now in public policy-- a politician. we talked about scholarships, about our loans, about how you can do these things when there's no money. the kids waited for us to shut up; they were trapped here just like they're trapped all day every day in school, waiting for people to shut up so they can leave. they were sick of people telling them to go to school: these were the college-bound kids anyway, headed for state schools and junior colleges, good heads on their shoulders, tired of being everyone's "hope".
at the end, the politician asked about our hospital. she asked if i could come up with any "quick fixes" that she could take up the ladder. i thought about the little color-coded box on the homepage at the hospital that tells us how crowded tha emergency room is. it always says "overcrowded" (or "very overcrowded" or "severely overcrowded" or "critically overcrowded") and, i think so you don't get all depressed about it, it adds "surge plan in effect". i've been laughing about that for months. i picture nurses in hard hats scurrying around peering at complicated diagrams but in real life there is no apparent change in anything at all down in the emergency room. it's always the same-- a hundred people in the waiting room who follow you painfully with their eyes when you walk by in your scrubs and white coat. i feel them asking me why i don't just stop and help them. i think about the people i admit to the hospital who really just needed a clinic appointment or a bottle of medicine-- who really just need a regular doctor. i think about the little room they've taken over, shoving a doctor in there so patients can be triaged within ten minutes of arrival, set up when that guy had a heart attack in the waiting room. i think about how i used to grab charts out of that room when the main emergency was too backed up to put more patients into but i had five or ten minutes before then next thing i was supposed to do so why not? and i think about the expanse of parking lot that's been promised to the ER for years and the fact that it's not the ER that's the problem, it's that other thing, the thing where people can't have a doctor, where you have to wait months to see even me.
i tell her the fast fixes are all we have, are all we do anymore. she waits. she's not done. her eyes ask me for one more fast fix. maybe we can put a resident on a stool in the middle of the waiting room, like they did at my old hospital, and have him write out prescriptions to last until your next appointment and have the secretaries make appointments.
and she's happy. and in a couple of years, if i'm lucky, i may be responsible for a stool.
i make a promise to avoid the eyes of the resident stuck on it. |
