Monday, February 4, 2008

Bribery 101 & You Should Be a Doctor!

We are way into bribery with our kids because it actually works. So during Christmas break I came up with a plan to give them 3 tickets each day for TV shows and if they didn't spend them all I would give them points on a chart which they could use for fun outings (things we were planning to do anyway, shhhh). Well, it actually worked and I don't have to listen to those annoying shows nearly as much now. We are taking the kids to Great Wolf Lodge for a couple nights this week for 200 tickets (sorry kids, Disney is 20,000 tickets- good luck!) and Megan also gets to miss some school. Up until this past Friday she was always begging to skip school, but then her teacher announced that they were so good they would have pajama day this coming Friday, yes a day we are gone. Megan finally figured that one out last night, oh the sobbing. I just can't win.

We do give the girls a free pass for movie night on Fridays when a new kid movie arrives from Netflix. The adults desperately need 92 minutes and 15 seconds of peace and quiet by the time Friday night rolls around. Sean is so burned out from all the bad attitude he gets from the GS employees at the hospital. There is a misconception among them that the doctors get paid too much and so I am making a flyer for him to hand out at work that will look something like this:

So You Wanna be a Doctor?
4 years of med school:
---acquire great debt either in years of service to the military or in student loans while everyone else you know is making money
---study every waking moment you aren't in the hospital
---stitch up the heads of prisoners who are chained in a back hallway at the training hospital (watch where you leave your scapel!)
--- 2 final words: rectal exams
Internship:
---finally get paid, less than you did as a bagger in high school (qualify for WIC if you have a baby!)
---work 126 hour weeks and when you do go home to sleep briefly, worry about which patients may die while you're gone because you may have made a mistake during your 18 hour work day
---3 final words: MORE rectal exams
Residency:
---get paid a tiny bit more but those student loans are earning interest every day
---work 119 hours a week, come in one hour later than your intern slave
---try to have a family like your non-medical friends, see your children only while they sleep
---4 years and 3 huge exams to get board certified

Staff doctor:
---after NINE years of training you finally get a real salary
---must start paying back those loans or years of service to the military (make a fraction of what the civilian docs do!)
---be responsible for the mistakes your staff make and if you try to discipline them for said mistakes, be prepared to deal with their union
---deal with bitter staff who resent that you get paid more than they do and thus they enjoy making your job harder

Good times! Fill out your med school application now! Hope you worked your butt off for four years in undergrad!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Don't forget to add about medical school: Being yelled at by the janitors at the hospital in the middle of the night.

julie said...

yes, janitors outrank med students, good point.

julie said...

I forgot to mention that any Army doc who goes to moonlight in a civilian hospital comes back with stories from the other side. The other docs are astonished to hear of such things as a doctor lounge and that everyone is not only polite, but nice to them with no sarcasm. Oh, and if a doc says something like, I want to book this OR for tomorrow it is magically done, someone does it for him instead of working AGAINST him to make it harder. 6.5 more years....