This might have been a better secret after #7 about unpleasant surgeons. I don’t know why I waited until number 10.
No, wait. Yes, I do.
Your coworkers can be as close as family. And, like all family, there are some bad apples.
After all, these are the people that you spend a lot of hours with. Lots of hours in stressful, high impact situations. Situations that are so tense one wrong move, or wrong word can wreck your entire day. Or, at least, the case.
No one said that you would like all of your coworkers. After all, they are not family. Not really. Not even chosen family. More like a gang thrown together under extreme circumstance and it is either learn how to work together or suffer for 8 or 10 or 12 hours.
Sometimes it works and your coworkers become like family.
Sometimes it doesn’t.
And when that happens it is like a black cloud, or a stench that you can’t get out of your nose all day. There are some people you will work with that are so teeth grittingly unpleasant that you fear for your dental work.
Trust me, we ALL have people that when we see them in our room as the team for the day we roll our eyes and think, “Ugh, not [blank] again.” No, seriously trust me. Even on the call shift that I work there are some team members that make me irate for no other reason than their mansplaining and general I’m the man and you are the woman and I know best attitude.
Ahem.
Not my night tech, she’s lovely.
However, to go back to the first secret, it isn’t about what we want. It is about caring for the patients. After all, they are the ones who have had all of their agency stripped from them, their clothes taken, their electronic leash to the world secured, their families shunted off to the waiting room.
The patients are why we grit our teeth and struggle through the shift with the person you would rather not spend all those hours with.
Or any hours with
Dispatches from the Evening Shift 