"What I had to learn was, that I'm responsible for my perception of things" - Chris Robinson.
The other day, when I came into my shift, I asked the outgoing doctor how his shift was. He responded, as he usually does, with how awful it was.
"It was a bad day. I had a sick kid who I stabilized thank goodness and had to send to Children's. Then this lady came in seizing. We had another guy with a STEMI, but we got him out fast. Oh and a dialysis patient with a potassium of 7.8 that almost coded, but we gave her the meds in time".
I looked at him and said, "Sounds like you didn't have a bad day at all. Sounds like you had an emergency medicine day. Actually, it seems like you really helped a lot of people and had some cool cases. Isn't that why you got into emergency medicine?"
When people complain about the day being too boring, or too many very sick patients, or too busy with patients who aren't very sick and are uninteresting, or too many traumas, or not enough traumas, and so on, and so on, I wonder to myself, "What kind of day are they hoping to have?"
There are certainly difficult shifts with very tough cases, emotionally and physically. But if you find yourself considering every shift a bad shift, ask yourself exactly what kind of day you'd like to have. And if every day is a bad day, it may be time to change your perception and rethink why you do what you do.
