Ain’t your bitch

**bleep... **bleep... goes my pager and I find a phone and dial the in the number.

“Hello?” comes the reply

“Hello, it’s Michael here, Anaesthetics. Were you paging me?”

“Err.. yes, It’s Shri here, surgical SHO. I was wandering if you could help us? We have a woman who needs some I.V. fluids but I’ve tried to site a cannula into her but I can’t. I was wandering if you were free to come and do this venflon for us? One of your colleagues kindly came and did it for us earlier today.”

“An anaesthetist came and put a venflon into her earlier?”

“That’s right, the registrar came and did it earlier”

“And what happened to that venflon?”

“It came out”

“Well, that’s not very responsible of you is it? Why didn’t you secure the line properly and make sure it doesn’t come out?”

“I don’t know. It just came out.”

“And you’ve tried and can’t put it back again?”

“Well, we tried earlier but none of us can do it”

“Has your registrar tried?”

“No.”

“Well, I don’t think it’s appropriate for you to call me to put in venflons in your patients.”

“I’m sorry??” comes the shocked voice at the end of the line. “One of you colleagues…”

“What one of my colleagues did as a favour is neither here nor there." I interupt. I'm getting a tad irritated by requests like this. "Look, this is what you should do. If you can’t put a venflon in, you need to call your registrar to come and do it, if he can’t do it then he needs to call the consultant to do it. If the consultant doesn’t want to do it then he needs to either get your reg to put in a central line or discuss with the ICU consultant about putting in a central line on the CEPOD list. If the ICU consultant agrees to that then we’ll come and put in a central line.”

“But I don’t think she needs a central line…”

“Then I suggest you either put a venflon in yourself or get one of your surgical colleagues to put one in. You guys are doctors too aren’t you?”

“But…”

“I’m not coming to do it. End of story. Either you sort it out yourselves or you go through the ICU consultant. Putting in your venflons is not what I’m on call for. Goodbye.”

Unsurprisingly, I didn’t hear anything more about that venflon. To me, there is a big difference between "helping" and "doing someone else's job for them."