The Love Boat

Seems everyone is keen to jump on the band wagon to get me hitched.

I confronted my registrar after yesterday's incident and asked whether she ever needed a surgical assistant in the first place. Apparently not. And apparently it was the anaesthetist's idea to make the call in the first place.

Grrr!

We have a patient who needed a catheter put in yesterday. He was writhing in pain from a full bladder and so I asked the nurses to put in a tube (3-way catheter). Apparently they are qualified to put in a 2 way but not a 3 way even though they are exactly the same size tube and length... I tried to explain this to them but they just couldn't process such complex information as "It's exactly the same as a 2-way" because they kept saying "No one on this urology ward is trained to put one in" (in that case which ward WOULD be trained if not the Urology one?)

So I got the stuff ready and went to shove a tube up a guys penis to help him pee. I squirted in 2 tubes of ligno gel (a tip my reg taught me to ensure the pt doesnt feel pain is to use more than 1 tube) and prepped the area. In went the tube... out came the wee. Too easy!

"Oh thankyou doctor! That was the best one I've had put in so far!"

"Really? All I did was put in anaesthetic?"

"Oh those nurses didn't use anaesthetic... they told me there was none for this."

"Um well there is... and they should know that..."

[24 hours later]

Relaying the story of my heroic catheterisation to the nursing staff when one pipes up "Yeah you certainly impressed him... he keeps talking about it and asked me if I had a boyfriend cos he wanted to set me up with YOU!"

Now it seems even my patients are getting in on this conspiracy to set the single young docotr up with anything with a XX chromosome.

What's with this? Do I have a sign over my head saying "Please set me up, I'm a socially inept male doctor who needs assistance from people with his love life"?

This never happened when I was a med student. Why now? When I have the least time of all?