I Want to Be a Doctor

Dr. Robin: Welcome back to I Want to Be a Doctor or Something. I'm Dr. Robin, and I'm here with my friend Jill, a registered nurse.

Jill: Hey, friends.

Dr. Robin: We're two healthcare besties sharing the real, wild, and funny side of medicine for anyone who's thought about a healthcare career. Ready?

Jill: Let's go.

Dr. Robin: So I think today we're doing a—would you rather? No, today's Never Have I Ever.

Jill: I've got something for you. So, never have I ever tricked the hospital vending machine into dispensing something. Have you ever done that?

Dr. Robin: Yeah. Oh, for sure. People do that. Which other people are like, what? You know, when you're in a hospital, it's the middle of the night. But in my case, it was actually my very first hospital rotation when I was in medical school. So I was at University Hospital, and for whatever reason, they gave everyone one pair of scrubs—one top, one bottom. That was it.

And the problem was, of course, you have to change your scrubs. So you'd have to take off your dirty scrubs, put on clean clothes, and then go stick your dirty scrubs into this vending machine, where you'd put your shirt in one side and your pants in the other and close it. Then it would give you your next pair. And if you didn't put in the old ones, you couldn't get new ones.

So here's the problem: you didn't always want to do that. People would run out in their underwear and go stick their scrubs in—mostly guys, right? They'd just go in their underwear. And the call rooms were a couple of halls down. It wasn't right next door. You weren't out on the floor, but the machines were really close to the elevators, so patients could see if you weren't careful. And, of course, I was not going to run down there in my underwear.

Then someone told me, 'You know what you do? You just put a towel in each one—one towel on the shirt side, one towel on the pants side—close it, and then it dispenses a new pair of scrubs.' Once the word got out, everyone did it. Everyone had two pairs of scrubs.

And I always wondered: when they did the laundry, it all went into a big bag that should have had nothing but scrubs, but it would be scrubs with towels. I'm sure the people in the laundry knew exactly what was happening. But no one ever told us not to, so yeah, we just kept doing that.

Jill: Oh my goodness. That's great. But that's very clever, to try to outsmart it.

Dr. Robin: Yeah.

Jill: I've never worked in an environment where you actually got your scrubs like that from a vending machine. We always purchased our scrubs. We always had to pay for them.

Dr. Robin: Yeah, I've never had to buy scrubs. I could if I wanted to, but we never had to. The hospitals all provided them.

I started at University Hospital, which, you know, is massive, and we had to use the scrub machines. But at most of the smaller hospitals, you'd just go into the changing room and they'd have stacks of scrubs in all the different sizes. So you could walk out with extra pairs if you wanted to, have them at home, and change into clean clothes there. It was so handy.

I cannot imagine having to buy all your own scrubs. It's so expensive. It's like your first paycheck just goes to scrubs.

Jill: You know, because if you come to work without your proper attire and scrubs on, then you get written up or something like that here.

Dr. Robin: Oh, yeah.

Jill: So yeah, you definitely have to buy them.

Dr. Robin: Oh, that's such a pain. We all wore exactly the same scrubs because they all came from the hospital. And as far as I know, every hospital in this whole area has the same scrubs, so you can't really tell the difference.

Jill: I kind of like that. I like that because it would be more economical, and you don't have to worry about what you're going to wear all the time.

Dr. Robin: No, not having to worry about what I wore was really nice. There were very few times when I didn't wear scrubs. Sometimes, if we were delivering one of our continuity patients—where we'd been taking care of them through the whole pregnancy and then were going to deliver the baby—we wouldn't have time to change into scrubs.

I remember one time I ruined my best pair of jeans because, you know, it's a messy process. They were my very favorite jeans. That's how I learned that hydrogen peroxide takes blood out of clothes. So I got my jeans back.

But otherwise, it was really nice not ruining your own clothes if, you know, things happen.

Jill: So you learned a lot of good tips, it sounds like. And I love the towel story. That's funny. I'm sure the people who did the laundry had some questions for everybody.

Dr. Robin: I'm sure they were like, 'What is going on here?'

So did you have vending machines? You said no vending machines for scrubs. Did you use vending machines for anything, or were the hospitals small enough that there weren't really vending machines?

Jill: Yeah, no—just really gross candy and stuff like that in the vending machine. If I was working night shift, things in the break room were sometimes expired. So yeah, that was it. That's the only kind of vending machine we had around here.

I remember getting a Kit Kat. I was so excited because I'd been working all night and had just gotten done with my med pass. And I'm like, 'I've got to have some kind of chocolate.' So I saw a Kit Kat, which is one of my favorite candy bars, and I got it and opened it.

It was just white and chalky and nasty and flaky. It kind of ruined my appetite, so I just threw it away and worked the rest of the shift.

Dr. Robin: Oh, that's a disappointment.

Jill: Yeah.

Dr. Robin: Especially when you're hoping for something and then it doesn't happen. That's so disappointing.

Jill: Yeah. And you need your chocolate fix every now and then, or caffeine sometimes at night to stay awake and get through it.

Dr. Robin: Yeah. They say you're not supposed to use food for anything other than—well, you know what? When you're working a 12-hour shift and it's the middle of the night and you're tired, food sometimes helps. It just does.

Jill: Yeah. Sometimes that willpower is just not quite enough to resist a candy bar every now and then.

Dr. Robin: Well, they've done studies of willpower showing that the more you use willpower, the less of it you have. It's a finite resource.

My favorite was research where they had people start in one room and use their willpower—or not use their willpower—and answer some questions. Then they walked down the hall to another room, and an accomplice would pass them in the hall with either a plate of vegetables or a plate of cookies and say, 'Oh, I just came from this meeting. We have some extras. Did you want a cookie?' Or, 'We have some extras. Do you want some vegetables?'

The people who resisted the cookie did the very worst with willpower in the rest of the study, and the people who ate the cookie did the very best. And so I heard that and I'm like, 'Probably better get the cookie then, huh?'

Jill: We can't be too hard on ourselves either. We just have to do the best we can and take care of ourselves as best we can as well.

Dr. Robin: That's it for today. If you want to be a doctor or something else healthcare-related, head over to docrobinschool.com/podcast. That's Doc Robin, like the bird, school dot com slash podcast, for your goodies.

Jill: Yeah, and don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss the next episode. Thanks so much for watching. Bye.

Dr. Robin: Bye, friends.