Sometimes, I wonder how we survived before our cell
phones. We still wear our trusty….
incredibly annoying, but trusty, pagers on our waistlines, but even
those are getting replaced by HIPAA compliant texting apps. At any one point in
time you could be texting in any and all of the following groups.
- The group including all residents
- the group including just senior residents,
- your service group without the students,
- your service group with the students included,
- the group including the rounding Attending for that day,
- the group including the Attending for whom you are seeing a consult for,
- the group including the ED attending, asking you to see yet another consult
- the group including the medicine residents asking for your updates about your mutual patients
- the group including the ICU residents who are taking care of your ICU service patients,
- individual texting streams between co-residents
- and if you’re lucky any various number of social groups demanding your attention as well.
So much information gets passed around instantaneously, I
wonder at how anything got done in the past. I imagine much more leg work and
time was spent to achieve the same results. Now my Attending can make a request
and with a little strategery and well sent messages, I can have an answer
and/or a task completed by the time my Attending has moved onto his next
thought.
It definitely has its place.
On the other hand, having a constant demand for immediate
response can be rather stressful and troublesome. Even trying to focus for a 7
minute conversation with a patient is difficult because your psyche is acutely
aware that your cell phone keeps vibrating in your pocket… messages needing
response, questions needing answered, consults needing seen.
The other day a message was sent out to the ‘WMC
residents’ group asking who was on call. My introverted self was exasperated.
It was yet another message I needed to look at, someone else needing something.
And then one more decision I had to make to not respond, which then caused
guilt that I had not responded to my colleague.
When I finally ran into the resident who had sent the
message I challenged him. Why the message had even been necessary as the answer
to his question was the click of an app away. Seriously, by clicking on the app
for our call schedule and then clicking on the day, the list of residents on
call would drop down for him. Much easier and quicker than typing out a text to
the group and then waiting for a response.
His eyes widened at my challenge, and he responded, “but
I wanted to text my friends!” He knew how to find out the call schedule
himself, but he had instead seen an opportunity to text with his friends and
opted for the social method of gathering his information.
Now it was my turn for my eyes to widen. I had merely
interpreted the scenario from a purely introverted perspective. Shying away
from an unnecessary conversation and then guilt for ignoring my co-resident.
Whereas, my extroverted colleague had simply wanted to enjoy his co-residents
in the small ways possible when you have a busy day.
The gap between introversion and extroversion widened and
bridged at the same time by our instantaneous communication and texting.
