- What's up, guys, Dr. Mike here.
People often ask me,
"What's it really like to be a doctor?"
- Hello, sick people, and their loved ones.
- Come on.
(gasping) (beeping)
You gotta be kidding me.
(dramatic music) (yelling)
All right, all right, enough, enough, enough.
Let's talk about what it's really like
to be in the hospital.
I've been at numerous hospitals,
I've spent countless hours in hospitals,
so I want to share with you my journey
and what it's like behind the scenes,
and share some really cool stories with you.
Let's get started.
I know what question you want answered first.
Is there so much loving going on in the hospital
that we just can't control ourselves?
No, I have seen some residents hit it off,
I've seen some doctors and nurses hit it off before,
and start dating outside of the hospital,
so it does occur, but it rarely, probably never,
occurs to the extent that people
are getting it on in janitorial closets.
I will say this, I do work with some nurses
who are in their 60s, and they've told me
that 20, 30 years ago, it was more like that.
They did go and visit some doctors in the back rooms
and in the boiler rooms, and, maybe 20, 30 years ago,
before my time, it was more romantic
and similar to Grey's Anatomy.
Sorry for those of you who wanted this,
but there's just not that much romance
that goes on in hospitals.
(laughs) - Excuse me?
- Next topic, money. (cash register dings)
Everyone thinks that doctors are rich.
The first thing I have to say, right off the bat,
is med school is very expensive.
Think Ferrari expensive, quarter million dollars expensive.
Then, the first three to five years
of being a doctor, out of medical school,
you're being paid a resident's salary,
which is very low.
When I was training, it ranged anywhere from
40 to 50,000 dollars a year.
Not a terrible salary, I agree with you,
but you're working sometimes 80 to 100 hours a week.
If you calculate what that comes out to hourly,
you're making around nine to 10 dollars an hour.
That's less than minimum wage in some places.
And then once you start a practice,
you have to pay your malpractice insurance,
which is sky-high for some specialties.
To be practicing Ob-Gyn in New York City,
you're paying sometimes a hundred,
two hundred thousand dollars a year alone for coverage.
That's just coverage.
Then if you want to open up your own practice,
you have to pay for the space,
you wanna hire a nurse, and a PA
and a scribe and this and that,
you have to pay for that as well.
But guess what, you still have
a quarter of a million dollars
in loans that you haven't been able to pay back.
So the whole notion that doctors are rich right off the bat
and it's an easy career that you can just go on
and make a lot of money, false.
Myth busted.
My student loan debt, upon graduating medical school
because I had some scholarships, was about 220,000 or so.
During my residency, you would make payments,
and they wouldn't be large payments,
because they would be based on your income.
It's called income-based repayment,
but I noticed that after two years of making these payments,
my amount that I owed actually went up
because of the percentage.
- Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!
- The next most common question probably
deals with losing a patient,
and being a resident, when you're on call,
you're in the hospital at night
and you're basically responsible
for any emergencies that go down.
So if there's a code blue, which means that someone's
heart has stopped, you're the one that has to run there
to resuscitate them, to bring them back to life.
So to answer the question, absolutely,
I've lost patients on my watch.
Not every resident or doctor handles death the same way.
And we get a to of coaching and education
about what the right way to handle death is,
and I don't; think there's ever a right way,
but the one good point that's I've seen
at these coaching sessions is that it's important
to not forcefully hide your emotions.
And that's a natural instinct that some people do,
they say, "I'm a doctor, I shouldn't cry."
Showing emotion is not a bad thing.
It's that when you let emotion take over you,
and it stops you from making quality decisions,
that's where it sort of crosses into territory
where it impedes your work.
It's very difficult to find the words
to share with the family members,
to help console them, but you're the person.
You're the one that has to be there.
I remember a specific story, one night I was on call,
and there was a code blue in the ICU.
There was a man, he was in his 90s,
and his heart stopped, we tried to resuscitate him,
it was unsuccessful and he ended up passing,
and his wife of 65 plus years was sitting
immediately outside of the room,
and I had to be the one to break the news to her.
So I got on my knee, I sort of held her hand,
and I explained to her everything, what happened,
and she was in shock, rightfully so.
She'd just lost the partner
she's been living with for over half a century.
So I told her what happened, I explained it,
she was very understanding and kind,
and I realized there wasn't anything more
I needed to say, but I couldn't leave,
I still needed to be there, so I sat with her
for probably 20 minutes, on my knee,
just holding her hand,
and after 20 minutes of sitting there,
she looked at me and just said thank you.
And that's what she needed.
Luckily for me that I didn't have a page during that moment,
that I would have to leave.
You wanna give everyone the proper amount of time
and have the conversation to its full capacity, right,
to make sure the person is okay with what happened,
they understand everything that's going on.
But remember, you're responsible for the entire hospital.
So your pager's constantly going off.
There other medical emergencies happening simultaneously.
So not only do you have to be very kind
and understanding of what's going on,
you also have to be realistic and explain to them
that you're gonna be back,
you're gonna have to deal with another emergency,
because you are the doctor that's responsible
for the entire hospital.
If you ever find yourself in a hospital,
and you see that the doctor is very stressed out
or feels like they're not just giving you
the proper amount of time,
ask if something urgent is going on
that they need to attend to first,
and so that they can come back maybe
and explain to you what's going on a little bit,
because it's very rare that a doctor's
being rude just to be rude,
or a nurse is being rude just to be rude.
Most of the time it's 'cause we're very busy
especially nowadays with insurance companies
clamping down on profits,
the hospitals are often slightly understaffed,
and we want to give you the proper amount of time,
and oftentimes there's just so many things
going on that we oftentimes can't.
As important as it is to talk about
moments of deaths in the hospital,
there's also some really uplifting moments
when it comes to life.
Being a family medicine physician,
I delivered just over 30 babies
in Overlook Medical Center.
One of the moms that I had in the OB clinic,
she had a very difficult pregnancy,
she had a complication regarding her gall bladder,
where she had to have her gall bladder removed
while she was pregnant.
She had a very protracted delivery, it was very long.
I sat there probably with her, you know, for 20 hours
and we were doing checks every now and then
to make sure that her cervix was still progressing,
and that we didn't need to give her any medications,
and it was progressing,
but it was just progressing very slowly,
and then, at midnight, it's like the baby knew,
it's midnight, Dr. Mike is exhausted,
it's time for me to poke my head out,
so we started the delivery,
baby came out, perfect, crying right away,
I didn't have to spank the baby's bottom,
just kidding, you don't have to do that.
Instantly take the baby and put the baby
on the mom;'s chest so they can have some interaction.
Looking at the mom's face immediately after
the delivery is such an amazing moment,
because it's a complex emotion that she's showing.
She's anxious, wants reassurance
that they baby's okay,
she's happy, she's exited.
There's just so much emotion that comes
out of that one first smile when the baby's first born.
There's really nothing else like it.
Finally, let's talk about the inaccuracies
that come with some of these TV shows.
As a doctor, it's painful to watch them at times,
because there's a lot of medical errors that are made.
They shock asystole with the paddles,
and not everybody understands that,
but as a doctor it's so frustrating
to see them give bad medical care.
In the TV dramas, doctors do everything.
They meet the patient in the ER,
they take them for the scans,
they perform the scans, they read the scans.
There's a lot of nursing care involved there
and it's a shame that these medical dramas
leaves the nurses out.
The nurse will not only take your vitals,
they'll give you their medications
pretty much the only interaction you have with the doctor
is describing what's going on,
hearing what the doctor's point of view is,
and that's pretty much it.
The rest of the time you're being surrounded by
tech staff, MAs, nursing staff,
and those are the people who are really
the backbone of medicine that I applaud,
and I feel like don't get recognized enough
in TV dramas.
I hope you enjoyed hearing about my experiences
in the hospital system.
It's definitely an interesting place,
as you can tell, I'm very passionate about it,
so if you want to learn more
and you have some questions or comments,
leave them down below.
As you know, that I'm very active
in the comments section.
I have a fun proposition for you.
If you get this video to 10,000 likes,
which is very doable, you've done that
for a lot of my videos already.
I will watch a Grey's Anatomy episode,
or whatever show you guys want me to watch,
leave it down below in the comments.
Not only will I watch that episode,
I will film myself watching the episode,
and talk about what's going on,
and it'll be a dedicated video
on just that subject.
I know a lot of you have asked me
to watch Grey's Anatomy before,
and I've never seen an episode
so I' think it's gonna be a fun challenge.
Get this video to 10,000 likes.
As always, stay happy and healthy.
(groovy upbeat music)