The Characters

Work is going well. The doctor I work for is kind of harsh, but I honestly don't care. He'll say things to me like "If you can't shake the cortisone vial before filling the syringe then what am I paying you for?" And in my head I say, "If you wanted someone skilled in preparing injections then you probably should have hired a pre-trained person. And PS - you really call that meager wage 'payment?'" That's how I get through the day, and it works. I like my job a lot and I don't let anything like that get me down.

People tell me that he's been "yelling" at my a lot. But most of the time I think of it as him just telling me the right way to do something. It's really all about how you interpret his tone of voice, and I just choose to interpret differently.

One thing that kind of sucks about my job is there is like no sense of camaraderie. People seem to be very worried about just themselves and their job, which makes it very hard to get trained. New PA, as I'll call her, is super helpful and patient with me. She's the only one who really takes the time to teach me and show me how to do things. I feel bad for her cause she's really learning too, since she hasn't even worked in Derm for a year, so I feel like a burden.

Senior PA kind of gives me an attitude when I ask questions, or that she's above that since she's a PA and not a Medical Assistant. For instance, I can't ask her how to fill out a Lab Requisition because she doesn't do that. She also doesn't seem to ask me to do that much when I'm seeing a patient with her, or expect me to write much, which is bad and good. Bad because I don't get use to writing things down or getting use to preparing procedures, good because it's less work for me. I generally like her. I just have to beware her bad side cause I know it's a beast.

Nurse, is the only actual nurse in the office. She was somewhat helpful teaching me for like the first couple days. But she's one of those people who likes to do everything and must always be doing a million things at once since the office can't go on without her. She's not that patient and basically doesn't like to be slowed down by training me. In her defense though, she does do everything and really does keep the office running smoothly.

I have become much better though recently. I think Doctor might be starting to like me. Today, Nurse was complaining about all this work she was going to have to do tomorrow and Doctor said, "Hey why don't you have Guy help you?" The task he said was obviously something that was a little advanced for me and Nurse said, "No, no, Guy has enough to get use to." Doctor then said, "Well Guy is pretty useful." It was probably one of the nicer things he's said, assuming it was sincere. He's very hard to read. He can be very sarcastic, which I generally can read well. But no one in the office can actually tell when he's serious. I often assume he's being sarcastic and will play it off that way, but people claim that little things he says here and there are actually great praise from him. Who knows. Like I said, I don't care all that much what he thinks about me.