Apart from saving lives and doing other heroic deeds...

Today I volunteered at the hospital. Volunteering at the hospital truly is a love-hate relationship for me. I love being in the hospital environment and randomly forcing docs to talk to me in the elevators, often to a stalkerish degree... Unfortunately, something that you realize after like three weeks of volunteering (they usually sugarcoat the job for atleast the first 2 weeks...) is that volunteering doesn't mean "helping the community" or "making a difference in healthcare" like you wrote on your volunteer application, but its usually a disgusting amount of filing, alphabetizing, and licking envelopes. Since I've been volunteering for over a year, I usually find myself doing some sucky job in a little office or sending mail (usually junk mail unworthy of being opened) to the docs. And I digress, but today was a different kind of sucky office filing. I was in the medical staff office that, until today, I thought only delivered mail, but it actually has a more awesome, secret function. In a small, code-locked room in the very corner of the office is a place where the hospital keeps its deepest darkest secrets. First of all, putting me in that room was probably the worst decision anyone could ever make, but if its a volunteer, "lets lock her in the sucky room with two hours of filing!" As I was thinking horrible thoughts in my head as I reached for the first paper on top of the 1-1.5 foot (yes, foot) stack of papers, I realized that these were the papers of failures. Those failures that can never be uttered within hearing distance without the slight chance of lawsuits or worse, losing your medical license. Every paper in the pile was a complaint, was a misunderstanding, was a failure that needed to be addressed. Its probably not a good idea for a doctor to come upfront and say that he or she accidentally dropped the baby due to the emergent conditions of the mother and the unusually quick delivery. So here, as I discovered, was the outlet for these doctors to admit their faults, to learn from their mistakes, and acknowledge the true mortal powers of a single human. But they must do it in hiding through these letters, emails, and dictations amongst eachother. Never letting on, but continuing to be super humans in the eyes of us lay people. The system is truly flawed.