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: Hi, 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? Let's go.

Jill, I have something I've been wondering. Is it just me, or did you ever take saltines or Jell-O from the unit pantry?

JILL: Oh my goodness. No, not just you. I'm guilty of that a lot. Tell me about your story.

DR. ROBIN: Oh, I was so grateful that those were there. But, you know, the nurses guard the unit pantries. You have to be on the good side of the nurses where they'll let you sneak in there. And we were never allowed, like, the ice cream. It was just the Jell-O and saltines, or maybe just the saltines.

I had never eaten saltines before, but I really developed a taste for them because when you're so desperate and then you finally get some saltines, there's this positive association where you're like, "Oh, it's going to be okay. I love my saltines." It is so silly. Salt mixed with those carbs—nothing can really hit it like that.

JILL: Well, the ice cream. Yeah, you're right. Us nurses, we guard the nutrition room pretty closely. But since I was a nurse, I had a little bit of privileges every now and then. And so I did sneak a chocolate ice cream sometimes whenever it was a really bad, long shift.

But yeah, I've definitely consumed many saltines, you know, crushed from the pack. And one of the best things was, like, if I was really, really hungry and a patient had been discharged and they still had their sandwiches and things like that, and if there was, like, a pimento cheese one, then occasionally I did that too. Because, you know, you've got to make it through 12 to 16 hours somehow.

DR. ROBIN: Yeah. People don't understand how important food is when you're medical. I mean, even before we started recording, we were both just like, food is such a thing. It's so important. Because you can go so many hours. You can't stop and eat if there are patients you've got to take care of. It's not like a normal job where you can be like, "Well, I'm going on my break. Good luck with that."

JILL: Right. Yeah. It's seldom that we get a lunch break a lot of times on the floor like that. So yeah, we take whatever we can get sometimes. And like you were saying earlier, sometimes you have to debate between one thing or another—which one looks a little better or worse than the other. This looks terrible. That looks terrible. I don't know, but I need food right now. Can't starve.

DR. ROBIN: Yeah. I knew there was a resident I worked with, and he would just take whatever food he found and mix it together. So it'd be like saltines on Jell-O, and then that would be food.

JILL: Yeah. Add some salt, some sugar, some color.

DR. ROBIN: I could not do that. I was the kid who separated everything on my plate.

JILL: So yeah, I understand that. Well, did you guys have a coffee machine too in your break room? That was a lifesaver for us.

DR. ROBIN: Well, I was really lucky because we got to use—well, once I was a resident. As a medical student, we couldn't go in the doctors' lounge. The doctors' lounge is kind of like the teachers' lounge, only it's for doctors.

So in residency, we were allowed to use the doctors' lounge, and that's really nice because there's coffee, soda, things like that all the time. Some doctors' lounges have a fridge too, which is really nice. The one where I did my residency—the one I spent the most time at—there was a fridge, but it was just doctors' lunches that they put in there. So you couldn't actually get food. But some days there'd be a fruit bowl with fruit.

Every day for lunch, they'd bring lunch in there, so that was really nice. And I was really lucky because it was a rural hospital with really good food. So I was so spoiled. When I moved back home and actually was in the hospital, I was so disappointed because I'd order supposedly the same menu item and it was, like, not food. I don't know what it was, but it was not good. We ate well at that hospital.

We couldn't use the doctors' lounge all the time for free lunches because there were too many residents. They would not like us overrunning the whole thing. So mostly we would eat at noon conference. But the doctors' lounge was nice.

The problem is the 30-hour shifts where there's no food from, like, five in the evening until seven or eight in the morning. That's the rough one, because the cafeteria is closed and, like, what are you going to do?

JILL: Oh yeah, I can totally relate. Where I was, at a small facility, they had the best café. They were only open from, like, 10:30 to 2:00 every day. And when I was on day shift, I hit it every single time. But then when I went to night shifts, I would walk by and I'd be like, "Oh, I can just taste it," you know? But yeah, they were never open.

So when you had to do a double or more than that, a lot of times you just kind of eat what you can. As long as it's not expired or smells funny or, like, oozing or something like that, then...

DR. ROBIN: The night is a different place. All rules are different at night.

JILL: Totally different. More scrounging.

DR. ROBIN: Lots of scrounging. Yeah. We're kind of figuring it out as you go, scrounging for not just food but supplies or other things because no one's there. So you can't order something if there's no one there to get it for you, or things are locked. It's just a little bit different.

JILL: Yeah, you're right. You get creative. Sometimes we would have doctors and things bring in different food in the daytime, but on night shift some of it was leftover. So sometimes you had to scrounge around and get something that wasn't the freshest, but we were still thankful.

DR. ROBIN: You know, my very first night on call ever was in medical school, and I had no idea what it was going to be like. There was this secret hidden closet. You'd open the door and there was a vending machine in there. It was not a normal vending machine. It had cafeteria food in it. It was a refrigerated one that spun in a circle, and you could push a button. Everyone got a code to get one thing each night they were on call. It was in a VA hospital or something.

So I put in my code and I got a piece of chocolate cake, and I was just like, "There's this magic closet with chocolate cake in it." It was the only good thing that happened that night. It was so horrible. I was on the verge of tears most of the time, but then I got this piece of chocolate cake.

Which—then we go around telling people, like, don't eat emotionally. And I'm like, well, what are you supposed to do at two in the morning? Everything's emotional at two in the morning.

JILL: I bet that machine was like the gates or the portals of heaven opening up whenever you saw that. That had to be so amazing.

DR. ROBIN: So the intern in charge of me was like, "You don't look like you're doing well."

I'm like, "No, I'm not okay."

And they're like, "Let me show you something."

And I was like, "What is it?"

They're like, "Just wait."

And I was like, what in the world could they be showing me in a hospital? Like the Chronicles of Narnia. They led us through the VA. It was an old VA hospital, which—those are so creepy. So we're going through these old, old hallways, and there's this door to a closet, and I'm like, what is going to be in here after this whole lead-in? And then I'm like, "A vending machine? What?"

JILL: That had to be so exciting. That's great. Well deserved after working hard like that, for sure.

So if anybody can relate to us, you'll have to put it in the comments down below because we'd like to know what you have had to eat whenever you were on shift working really long and just trying to get by with some nutrition.

DR. ROBIN: Or for kids, if you're doing schoolwork or homework or something, what do you like eating? I know for me, I always had to have my water with a little bit of flavoring in it. Sometimes when it was really bad, I'd line up a line of marshmallows and I'd eat one mini marshmallow for each page.

Yeah, I've been kind of a food-reward person, which you're not supposed to be, but again, there comes a point in the middle of the night where nothing else feels good.

JILL: That's right. And everything in moderation. It's what you have to do to get by sometimes. But yeah, we'd love to see the kids' comments too, if there's anything that you like whenever you're studying, for sure.

DR. ROBIN: I think we're all out of time here. So that's it for today. If you want to be a doctor or something else healthcare-related, head over to docrobinschool.com/podcast for your goodies. That's Doc Robin—like the bird—School dot com.

JILL: And remember to subscribe so you don't miss the next episode.

DR. ROBIN: Thanks so much for watching, friends. Bye-bye.

JILL: Bye, friends.