Telephone

Telephone manner cannot be found within the undergraduate medical curriculum, but it's something that doctors have to learn throughout the years of medical training.

Doctors are regularly called upon to answer pager. Some are summoned to resuscitate patients whose hearts stop beating, while others are called because their patients have difficulty with counting sheep. Several of them are paged in the middle of a concert. The question could sometimes be about the doctor's indecipherable handwriting, or else, an unnecessary intrusion into the doctor's sleep. More often, the doctors are called when their juniors feel uncomfortable.

Just as a doctor needs to choose his words carefully in front of patients, he must tailor the answer to his junior doctor's query. I know that it's not easy and I'm not here to tell you that we're hard-wired to answer the phone call patiently. Actually, we aren't, most of the time.

This brings me to a remarkable story from a surgeon friend of mine last night. We had dinner and talked about an eminent chief surgeon in the field of liver transplant. The true story is not a tale of hero on one side and villain on the other. Few true stories are. "He is really mean on giving out good marks." lamented my friend. "Not even his own team members." Yet those poor grades in the annual assessment, harsh as they are, don't tell the whole story of that chief surgeon. "When it comes to calling him in the middle of a difficult surgery," she told me, "he never says no over the phone. He will come back and sort things out. Guaranteed."

That chief surgeon's passion reminds me to behave myself over the phone, when I am on call tonight.    

Mary Poppins

I began to get a pretty good sense of kids' stories. Mary Poppins is a case in point. That's one of Jasmine's most favorite stories recently.

In particular, she loves the character of jovial Uncle Albert who floats up in the air whenever he laughs. All visitors of Uncle Albert can join him in a tea party in mid-air, as long as they chuckle together. One word of caution: thinking of something sad will take away your flying magic.

That says everything about the magic of laughter. "It's laughing that does it, you know." This may sound easy - and it is - but it requires our own thinking. There are no licensed laughterologists. For many bedtime story times, I'd reminded my daughter to learn from Uncle Albert, "So. We can decide ourselves whether we fly or fall."

You are probably thinking that it's too early to teach her the lesson, but it isn't. I just knew somehow, after learning a painful lesson ourselves, that she understood. Alas, my wife actually ruined her car's rear bumper while backing out of a parking space tonight. We decided to buy a box of chocolate and then Jasmine helped her mom through the let-go steps.

For the next half hour, we played all sorts of games together. When Jasmine heard her mom talking about the insurance coverage, she told her mom matter-of-factly, "Hey - haven't you got the chocolate? Why are you still sad?"

Kid's Diary

I can easily go on my errands after picking up a book at random. That includes kid's story books, like Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

Don't laugh - unless you're laughing at the story's character Greg Heffley instead of me.

Well, I learned a lot from Grey Heffley, too. His school playground started off the year with all sorts of things, like monkey bars and swings and stuff. But that was a year ago. Then the playground became an empty sawdust pit. It's hard to say how long it takes but Greg was rock-solid certain that the school was having trouble paying the insurance for the playground. Every time there was some kind of accident or injury on a piece of equipment, and imagine, the easiest thing to do was just remove it.

When I read Greg's comment that "people are getting too carried away with all this safety stuff," my "uh-oh" bell rings. The same is true in hospitals that have come up with all those mighty safety measures.