Doctor Diaries: The one about women in Urology.

Staying on a similar topic to the one about the penis, this is still set in my rotation of urology.  As a doctor it is not unusual that patients are ok with having doctors of the same or a different sex, for the most part.  After all there are male gynaecologists and obstetricians as well as female urologists.

I would say though, that women junior doctors are treated differently to their male counterparts.  Whenever I was summoned by the nursing staff to come and put a catheter in a male patient (all nurses can do women but they have to do a post qualification certificate to be able to catheterise men) I would arrive on the ward and just be told the patient’s name.  I then had to gather the equipment, set up a trolley, catheterise alone and clean up.  In contrast, when a male colleague was summoned, his trolley was set up and cleaned away by the nursing staff who also assisted him with the procedure.  The main irritation with this was the length of time taken to find all of the equipment necessary (it seemed the cupboards on the wards were always being rearranged like they do with supermarket isles) and part of the procedure is dirty and part is sterile so it is much quicker to complete if someone assists as the dirty pair of hands.  Being the only female on the rotation I kept my head down and kept going….or so I thought.

As house officers and senior house officers we also had to take it in turns to carry the admission bleep, the one that led to the penis incident.  One day my male colleagues were annoyed that they were having to assess GP admissions when they believed all admissions came in via the  surgical admissions unit (SAU) so surely the GPs should be calling there.  The registrars (next doctors up the food chain above the SHOs and one below the consultant) who supervised us agreed and said we should refuse to take admissions from the GPs, rather redirect them to the SAU. Always one (at that stage in my career) to follow orders I diligently referred the next GP to the SAU.  

Part way through the afternoon the consultant on call (Mr James) barged onto the ward demanding to know who was on call, the whole group of juniors were there and began looking studiously at their shoes, the walls, their hands, anywhere but Mr James, I acknowledged it was me.  Mr James tore a strip off of me asking why I had refused to take the referral (from his GP wife) and all I could weakly say was that was the direction of our seniors (who were standing right there and I am not a nark) he asked who and I stayed silent.  I was told this would go on my record and it didn’t look good for me.  Note that the male registrar who had issued the order was standing right there, had far more authority than I did but did not say one word.

I was shunned by the senior staff for about a fortnight, given all of the worst jobs, expected to do the work of my male colleagues so they could go to theatre or clinic and generally ignored by everyone.  I was having to work later and later just to get everything done and prepped for the next day.  At one point my educational supervisor said ‘I don’t know why you stay so late, you never seem to get anything done’.  

Just as this became soul destroying salvation arrived in the form of a letter from a GP…….

A week or so before the referral incident I had answered my day bleep at 6pm, I was supposed to leave work at 5pm but any junior doctor out there will tell you leaving bang on time is unachievable.  On the end of the phone was a GP asking for an update on a patient he had sent in, not one of mine which I politely explained and I told him the doctor who he was under had gone home for the day but if he would bare with me I would find out what I could.  I dissected the patient notes with the GP on the phone then I walked around to the patient’s bedside to ask him how he was and the GP had a chat with him.  It seems this kind GP had then written to the director of urology to point out how helpful I had been especially when I should have already gone home.  

The director of urology called me into his office, showed me the letter and said ‘so you don’t hate GPs after all.  I must admit this letter has saved you after your previous behaviour’.

So thanks to that GP and no thanks to my male urology colleagues who did their best to leave me in the sh*te, I passed my urology rotation.  Suck on that!....well it is urology.

From that moment on I made my own decisions, didn’t blindly do what the men told me to (it’s amazing how self serving trainee surgeons can be, think Greys Anatomy) and generally fared much better in each job …. Until orthopaedics.