I Know

Similar to comrades in the army, doctors within a team call each other for dinner even though we're busy.

It's fairly obvious that there isn't convenient time common to the doctors. "Alright, you go first, and I'll finish admitting my cases and join you guys in a minute."

As we all know, virtually nobody will turn up one minute after that remark. Even so, the phrase "in a minute" can mean anything like fifteen minutes or forever. The difference in sense of time is unbelievably easy to grasp. Doctors know each other well and recognize what that particular colleague usually means by one minute. We just know.

Any of us who has worked in an office with someone else for few months can usually tell when that person will be back if he says, "I'll be gone for a while." The interesting thing is that we don't have to be that explicit soon after we get along with each other.

Once we start getting used to the I-know-you-know-what-I-know manner, there is embarrassing story waiting to happen. This I know, too. There is another story I like to tell. Many years ago I was asking a nurse to help me getting a needle into the knee joint of my patient. I had to wear sterile gloves and cleanse my patient's skin with povidone iodine solution before puncturing the joint; these are the rules for doctors to prevent infection. "Could you please fetch me the soya sauce?" Lest I begin to confuse those of you who aren't working in the hospital, let me say that soya sauce is a byword to describe the brown povidone iodine solution. The nurse disappeared. I waited. I mused. "What, for heaven's sake, keeps my nurse from getting back to me?"

And no prizes for guessing that I found my nurse busy scratching her head to find a bottle of soya sauce in the pantry.