Never get between hungry surgeons and their food
YouTubers could learn a thing or two by watching exhausted residents
Can stories be life or death?
My first few weeks of residency were a blur.
Exhausted 5am bike rides to the hospital gave way to endless days juggling to-do’s and evenings spent worrying I had made a mistake.
It felt like a constant fight to keep my head above water.
Want a glimpse? Here’s an actual photo of my (trainwreck) to-do list at the end of the very first day:
But the true chaos in those early weeks revealed itself for me and my co-interns every night, during that magical hour known as ✨signout✨.
Signout marks the change of shift. It’s when the daytime residents hand over their patients to the evening team - taking care to highlight every last detail that might be important.
It’s the final task a resident must accomplish each day before they can get home to dinner. Speed is of the essence, except…
The stakes couldn’t be higher.
Leave something out of your signout, and the repercussions for your patient could be dangerous.
The night team might not know to re-check a hemoglobin on a patient who could be bleeding. They might forget to keep patients NPO for procedures in the morning. They might miss a patient with a concerning abdomen. You get the idea.
And yet - in the beginning of the academic year, every new resident’s signout sounds more or less the same: a jumble of names, surgeries, labs to follow up on, and things to do.
But then something magical happens - like clockwork:
The residents become storytellers.
And not just storytellers: damned good storytellers.
You see - somewhere around the first month of residency, residents instinctively start using stories that capture the arc of a patient’s course to convey massive amounts of information. And it works.
Details are easier to keep track of.
Handoffs are smoother.
And tired, hungry residents get home to dinner even sooner.
These are stories the best YouTubers - from Mr. Beast to Chubbyemu - would be proud of.
They start with a solid hook (Mr. Jones is our 64 year old patient here after whipple, complicated by GDA stump blowout).
They continue with a story, boiled down to the essence (his bleeding was caught early. IR was called, and embolized the GDA stump successfully. He received just 3 units of packed cells and 2 of plasma in total.)
They finish with a clear call to action (check the 8pm hemoglobin and keep an eye on his drain outputs).
Tons of information.
Packed neatly into discrete, memorable stories.
Stories that you might even call life-saving.
Want to be a better storyteller? The answer might be waiting in the nearest resident call room.