The Big D Awards! (Friday Links)

So last post Doctor D examined the ways The Man is always trying to hold us decent bloggers down. With all the great blogs by medical students and nurses they got no love from The Man over at Medgadget.

With all the thankless hard work med students and nurses do the least we could do is recognize their blogs! So Doctor D decided to stick it to The Man, and declare his own Medblog Awards!

So one lucky Nurse Blogger and Med Student Blogger shall be declared "the most awesomest medblog in existence" and receive the coveted Big D Award:

The Big D Award

The nominees for The Big D in NurseBlogging:

• Call Bells Make Me Nervous
  
• New Nurse Insanity, Fundus Chop!
  
• Life In The ER
• Nurse Me
  
• At Your Cervix
  
• Those Emergency Blues
  
• Weird Nursing Tales
  

The nominees for The Big D in Med Student Blogging:

• Journey To MD
  
• Indifferential Diagnosis
  
• Asystole Is The Most Stable Rhythm
  
• Old MD Girl
• Doc 2 Be
  
• The Life & Times of J. O. Morris
• Med Student 101
• Medically Mind Numbing
• The Dragonfly Initiative

Enjoy discovering the odd worlds of nursing and medical school! Bloggers, rally your readers and send them to vote you to victory!

The winner in each category gets the honor of a Big D Award and a free Supratentorial Mug direct from Doctor D.

Doctor D nominated the good nurse and med student blogs he knows, but the blogsphere is a big place there are probably other frickin' awesome nurse and med student bloggers out there. Nominate your favorite nurse or med student blog that Doctor D missed in the nominees. Shameless self-promotion is allowed! (as long as it isn't spam)

D's favorite new blog will get a link, and the reader who nominated it will also get a Supratentorial Mug!

The winners will be announced next Friday. Have Fun!

It Was Fun While It Lasted

Today is a sad day here at AskAnMD.

Doctor D was really excited about this new blog getting nominated for "Best Medical Weblog of 2009." Doctor D was doing his victory dance and playing "Eye of the Tiger" so loud the neighbors complained because he was totally gonna win that sucka.

Alas The Man over at Medgadget didn't think Doctor D's blog should be in the finals, thus all the AskAnMD fans that couldn't wait to vote it to victory were disenfranchised. Doctor D suspects The Man is dabbling in politics again since a lot of the finalist blogs in this category look like they were written by corporations or medical schools and are about as interesting as watching paint dry.

But never fear! The Man didn't totally succeed in exterminating personality in medblogging. Our dear friend Doctor Rob from Distractable Mind slipped into the finals!

So mosey on over there and vote for Dr. Rob early and often!

Is Doctor D encouraging you to vote more than once? Naw, you must have misunderstood that.

While you are over there be sure to support the beautiful work being done by WordDoc at Medical Moments in 55 Words for Best Literary Medical Weblog.

The real competition this year comes in Best Patient's Blog. Three of Doctor D's total favorites made the list: Queen of Optimism, ∞ itis, and RheumaBlog. Doctor D is so torn, because all those blogs are excellent! I might just have to vote for all of them.

Would Doctor D vote more than once? Of course not! You guys are totally misunderstanding me.

Have fun voting!

By the way, did you notice that Medgadged totally ignored medblogging nurses? WTF? Why is The Man always trying to hold the RNs down? Medical students too!

That's it! Doctor D has to set this right:

Tune in to this week's Friday Links to Vote for Doctor D's totally unofficial NurseBlog of the Year and MedStudentBlog of the Year awards!

Feel free to say sweet and comforting things in the comments to console Doctor D in his time of sorrow. Or you can just tell him to get over it and be a man, because its just some stupid contest and he isn't 8 years old!

The Medical Life (Friday Links)

The blogs of health workers can be a fascinating peak into the minds and motivations of those of us in medical life. I enjoy the funny or amazing true stories on blogs as much as the next guy, but what's really interesting to me are the lives of people who choose to work with sickness and suffering every day.

Judging by the number of TV shows on us it appears that the public at large is fascinated with medical students, nurses, and doctors too. Truth be told, we aren't as good looking, dramatic, or perfect as our TV counterparts. We are normal people, but personally I prefer real people over stock characters with stethoscopes.

One of my favorite nurse bloggers, Maha, used the turn of the decade to tell the fascinating and personal story of her life over the last 10 years. Her personal growth during her journey to become an ER nurse is very interesting reading. Behind the sharp wit and toughness there is a humanity and sensitivity that makes her blog one of the best out there.

I found another glimpse into the personal motivations for a medical life over at Asystole Is The Most Stable Rhythm. Besides having the coolest blog name ever AlbinoBlackBear has some great stories. Her encounter with a dying child years ago as a nurse left her wondering if healthcare was a good choice for her. The answer was yes and now she is in medical school. Asystole is a wonderful med student blog and I can't believe it took me this long to find it.

So what leads people to choose a medical life?

Ella the med student and Old Girl both followed Maha's lead and posted their own biographies of 2000 to 2010. Doctor D shall follow in the footsteps of these great bloggers and give you a brief picture of how he has transformed over the last decade:

At the dawn of 2000 young D was a college senior applying for medical school. He was a bold, iconoclastic idealist who was certain he would save the world. Young D wore a long beard with long hair and was certain that human suffering was a puzzle that could be fixed if people just cared enough to help others. He figured that medicine was the highest and purest calling a person could choose for their life.

Then came reality: years of medical school, followed by years of residency, followed by the ultimate goal—being a "real doctor."

After a decade of ceaseless work I no longer think I am going to save the world. I have saved a few lives, but it was by doing my job not through any heroism. Jesus may save the world, but doctors and nurses certainly won't. We simply do our jobs day in and day out.

In the end, the medical life is a life like any other. It isn't always fun or sexy. We are not so brilliant or so heroic. We are humans who take care of humans, so our work is fraught all those troublesome human complications. Some days we love our vocation and some days we want to quit, but we do our best because we care about our patients.

In 2010 Doctor D is more tired and less idealistic. These days D is more more proud to be Ms. D's husband and Little D's dad than he is about that MD he spent so many years dreaming about.

What do you think? Did you imagine doctor's lives to be more heroic and dramatic? Do you work in healthcare and have a story about your own medical life to share? Doctor D always enjoys the perspectives and stories you tell in the comments.

ER Nursing Blogs (Friday Linkages)

Doctor D actually works in an Emergency Room, but he only rarely tells fun ER stories. He prefers leaving the wild and crayzee emergency stories to the professionals. Nurses always have the best emergency room stories.

With Nurse K still on blogging hiatus the world is a little less fun, but fortunately Doctor D as a little ER joy to share. He has found two ER nurse blogs that never cease to make him smile:

• Nurse Lee is a newcomer to medblogging who blogs at Life in the ER. Doctor D found her when he came across this post and has been enjoying her ever since. She can be a bit silly, and Doctor D has no idea whats up with the glamor shot with a gasmask profile picture. Perhaps her way of preventing airborne illnesses? You should go check Nurse Lee out.

• Another great ER nurseblogger is Tex over at Weird Nursing Tales. He has been serving up wildness from the ER since 2007.
  

Of course, neither Tex or Lee could ever replace good old Nurse K, but reading them will definitely help scratch that ER story itch until K makes her triumphant return.

You can also hang around here with Doctor D (who isn't nearly as funny) to hear more next week about how silly the 1 to 10 painscale is, and to get your doctoring questions answered.

Nurses VS. Residents

Question from a reader:

What is the relationship supposed to be between nurses and residents in a large teaching hospital? During a lengthy stay for a surgery, I noticed a tension between these two groups, especially between junior residents and highly experienced nurses. Perhaps it is inevitable?

It wasn't that long ago that Doctor D was a resident in a teaching hospital and he can still recollect old days of being a young doc fresh out of med school and working beside experienced nurses...

The rules of medicine say that the doctor should call the shots, but this can be problematic when a new doc with no experience is giving orders to nurses who have been taking care of patients for years. There will always be some tension. It's like a captain just out of military academy taking command of a group of battle-hardened veterans. The captain may have an officer's rank and a head full of military theory, but the foot soldiers are the only ones who know what it's like to get shot at.

Ideally, this tension will make the team better. The young doctor learns a lot from working with experienced nurses, and the fresh ideas from the newly-educated residents improves the care the nurses give.

Unfortunately people who should be working together sometimes go to fighting amongst themselves. When inflated egos of new doctors or experienced nurses cause trouble and it is patients who can get hurt. Any doctor who doesn't listen to experienced nurses is headed for disaster, and any nurses who abuse new doctors are harming both patient care and medical education. Once the battle gets going, however, it is hard for either side to back down.

The best strategy is to start out on friendly terms and work to stay there. When Doctor D started residency the first advice his attending gave him was, "Be good to the nurses and you'll do well."

Mutual respect and open-communication works best for everyone, including patients. I can tell you it is hard to be nice when an older nurse is giving you shit just for being young. I'm sure nurses can attest that it's equally difficult to refrain from kicking the ass of a cocky resident with a big god-complex and zero inexperience. I have found, however, that if I bite my tongue and act respectful the obnoxious behavior of insecure nurses and doctors usually subsides to a tolerable level.

If you are a patient in a hospital where the tension between residents and nurses has broken into open warfare this is a bad sign. I would advise you appeal to a higher power to intervene, such as an attending physician or head of nursing. Don't take sides--trust me you don't want a part of that battle. Just tell them that you as a patient are worried by the animosity. Usually the responsible authorities can sort out who needs to have "come to Jesus" talk so that both sides can calm down and start playing nice together.

Have you ever witnessed (or been a part of) an interesting Nurse VS. Resident conflict? How was it resolved? I would love to hear your stories in the comments.

Query for Questions (Friday Links)

First of all, thanks to everyone sending in all the great questions. Doctor D has some really interesting questions to discuss over the next several weeks.

Thus far, all the questions on this blog have been from patients. To understand the view from the patient side of the exam room Doctor D is reading some great patient blogs like Queen of Optimism, ∞-itis, and Neo-Conduit.

But Doctor D thought he would use this Friday Links to suggest a few other types of questions he would love to answer:

Dr. D: “Who spends even more time with doctors than patients and often wonders, 'WTF is wrong with these MDs?'”

Student in back raises hand: “Nurses!”

Dr. D: “Right! Nurses have to take crap from annoying doctors all day long! They must have questions about doctors eating at them! Doctor D would love some questions from nurses. He promises not to ignore their questions like the other MD pricks. Hear that, Nurse K? Let Doctor D have it!”

So Doctor D's first Friday Link is a nursing blog. With Nurse K on hiatus, D had to find a new favorite nurse in the blogsphere. Doctor D is really enjoying The Lonely Midwife. D has a special place in his heart for midwifery since a midwife delivered his kid, Little D. Lonely Midwife just passed her boards so go on over there and congratulate her!

Dr. D: “Okay, next question. Who else has lots of questions they're just dying to ask doctors?”

Students shuffle feet and look at the floor.

Dr. D: “Come on! You know this one!”

Students sheepishly avoid eye contact.

Dr D: “Medical Students! You guys are working yourselves ragged trying to become Doctors. I know you've got some wacky doctoring questions you can't ask your attendings. This is your chance to pimp an attending! Doctor D stands ready to assist weary students walking the long road he has traveled before.”

This leads D to our second Friday Link, a really great med student blog he recommends: Journey to MD... and Beyond. Ella must be a frick'n genius to have time to blog during medical school, but we are all the better off for her excellent insights! Doctor D could have never kept up a great blog like that in med school.

Doctor D still loves questions from patients too! He just thought it would be fun to sprinkle a little variety in the questions.

Remember Doctor D doesn't do diagnosis or treatment over the web. But questions about doctors' brains, doctors' mistakes, doctors' behavior, doctors' lives, etc. are all fair game. So keep the questions rolling in!

You can also send your questions to Doctor D via Twitter.
Doctor D also links to great med-blog posts on his Twitter Feed.