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.