On his first week as a surgery intern, Dane Colbert began what is sure to be a storied career in medicine by asking the nurse who paged him if he could have four options to choose from before making a decision.
“I was kind of taken off guard,” remembers Natalie Bennett, a floor nurse who had paged Dane wondering what he would like to do for a post-op patient after they were noted to have a pressure of 194/115. After several minutes of fretful consultations with UpToDate, Medscape, and Wikipedia, Dane finally broke down and called back nurse Bennett to see if perhaps there were four options that he could choose from.
He requested that ideally two choices that were clearly wrong, one that seemed like it could be right, and finally a fourth option that was the clear correct choice. “If you could label those options A through D, that would be super as well.”
“It was actually kind of endearing listening to him struggle,” Natalie later commented. “His bumbling would have been adorable if its implications weren’t so terrifying.” As of press time Dr Colbert had finally decided to call his chief, who told him to just ignore the page.
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