Transferred to...

I recently read that a friend of mine, one of the residents during my internship, had passed the American internal medicine specialty boards. It wasn’t a big surprise since Julien is quite smart and a great guy, even if he is from Switzerland.

Poor Julien was in a special level of hell in that technically-still-within-the-borders-of-the-US state, as nobody born in Louisiana could ever pronounce his last name. One would think that Dandrieux (Don-dree-oo, more or less, and extra points if you use your best Inspector Clouseau accent) wouldn’t be that difficult in a land where every other person is named Boudreaux. But no, early on someone decided that his last name was “Dan-dri-no” (extra points for a nasal twang), and no amount of effort was going to change that. The students and techs paged him as Dr. Dan-dri-no over the loud speaker, the receptionists told the clients that Dr. Dan-dri-no was with another patient, and the owners were so busy exclaiming over his French accent that they never bothered to ask. It probably didn’t help that the rest of the house officers called him Dan-dri-no just to annoy him…

Anyhow, all of the residents and interns had to turn in case logs in order to get paid for emergency shifts. A modern hospital would be able to look in the computer to figure out which cases a doctor had seen on emergency, but this was Louisiana, so at the end of each shift you sat down and filled out a spreadsheet of the cases you had seen. We were supposed to be paid $10 for every emergency case, and you might see fifteen cases in a shift, so it was theoretically worth filling out the paperwork. Especially since the base intern salary qualified you for food stamps.

Once a week you would turn in all of your case logs, and then a few months later a small random amount of money (eg, $73.12) would show up in your bank account. We all spent some time with the person in charge trying to figure out how the money related to the case logs, but there was absolutely no accountability. I sometimes think that it’s absolutely impossible for anyone to be that incompetent, so she must have just been embezzling that money. But then I think about some of the other staff that were still employed there and realize that it’s possible that she just was that incompetent.

Aside from the patient id, owner’s name, presenting complaint, and date, the case logs also had a column labeled “Transferred to”. I always wrote one of the following: surgery, medicine, home, died, or euthanized. When I looked at Julien’s case logs, he had slightly different options: surgery, medicine, home, or what I initially thought was an elongated plus sign.

I merely killed my patients, Julien was transferring them to God.