(Here's post I wrote but didn't publish, a long while ago -- well before a subsequent kerfuffle, or any of my recent rants and the comments thereon... So no, I'm certainly not talking about you. Or you.)
[And the preceding was written longer ago still. I'd figured I'd not publish it at all, because it might be seen in light of some comment-conversations I've had with a particular ER doc. Such is not the case. It was WAY long ago that I wrote it. I suppose the post makes me a hypocrite; except I only rant on weekends, and describe it as such; whereas many ER blogs are suffused with extremities all the time. Plus, I'm about to hang it up, so WTF. Since, increasingly, I can't think of anything new and good, I may as well put the old and bad out there. At one point so long ago, I took the time to write it. So here it is:]
It could be said that the blogs of ER docs are the most colorful of the medblogs (and, by golly, I just did!) With no exceptions that I know of, their proprietors are excellent writers and humorous, plus they have lots of great stories, working as they do with nearly perfect substrate. And it's a pretty good job: never boring, clear and specific (one might say "surgical") tasks, predictable hours, decent pay, no calls when not at work. So why are those guys so pissed off all the time?
Training in one of the nation's premier trauma centers, I think I've seen it all. Inundated every day with countless dispossessed and deprived people whose only source of medical care was the emergency room, we also saw all the trauma and emergency surgical cases transported by every aid car in the city. As an intern just starting out, at first I tried to attach every drunk and druggie to a social worker, the crazies to a shrink, to arrange rehab, make appropriate followup appointments. It didn't take long to realize that in spending that extra time, I was depriving others of needed care. I went from bleeding heart to speeding chart, and got a lot more care to a lot more people. I saw cops and criminals, drunks and dregs, do-gooders, junkies by the bagfull. I've been lied to, spit at, cursed up, dressed down, swung on by people I was trying to help. Some came back and back, promises busted like my nice suture-work. I have no illusions. I understand, and I participated. Dark humor, darker view of humanity: they come with the territory. It's self-preservation, if nothing else. Schadenfreude was I. Joker at expense. Still, I think I managed...
Spending day after day in emergency care takes a heavy toll, I know. I love the stories, I value the work. And yet. Reading some ER blogs -- not all, and by no means all the time -- I find the vitriol off-putting. The derision. And the take-no-prisoners attitude -- the downright hatred, so it often seems -- toward "liberals," suffused throughout. (Not to mention a similar attitude, quite often, toward their own clientele). I love political give-and-take; most of my work-colleagues politicked far to my right, yet we had enlightening and stimulating, good-hearted arguments. But reading some ER blogs, unlike any other category in the healthosphere, is like listening to Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter. It's a polemicist's playground. I've had my moments of moral muttering, liberally laced with haughty holiness. I consider George Bush the worst president we've ever had (and no, Mr. Bush, history will not vindicate you). But I've never called him "a bucket of spit." Nor do I kiss off all conservatives as some sort of existential threat. (Some, of course. But not the whole group.) Physicians are, in general, a conservative bunch. But they're also educated; enough, you'd think, to have left their minds at least slightly ajar.
Maybe it's an inevitable corollary: working in an ER turns people. Another possibility: people who lean loudest to the right are the ones who choose the job in the first place. Or perhaps (with a couple of exceptions) it's just that the rightward ER docs blog, and the leftward ones go home and tie-dye.
