The Golden Rule

Reciprocity. What goes around comes around. Karma. You reap what you sow. I don't care how you phrase it; it's true.
I emphasize to my med students and interns that I am available to help with whatever, whenever, however I can. How you treat underlings (yeah, I have underlings now) is even more important than how you treat authority figures, so I make a point to teach them, keep them involved, and overall just plain treat them like I wanted to be treated as a med student and/or intern.
This occasionally results in extra work because someone will eventually take you up on your offer and actually ask for your help. Like Friday, when I spent an hour helping someone else's intern with a paracentesis.* I had four new admissions of my own, but I couldn't rescind my offer.
And man, is payback a cupcake.
Saturday night said intern was on call, and he spent a couple of hours making a (ahem) difficult discharge happen for my team.
Since one good turn deserves another (and because he really went over and above the call of cross-cover** duty), I am making cinnamon rolls tonight for him and his whole team to have for breakfast tomorrow. Sure tastes like a winning strategy to me.



*Paracentesis is the procedure by which fluid that has accumulated in the belly for various and sundry reasons (aka ascites) is removed. This involves a very, very long needle and a lot of awkward chit-chat with the non-sedated patient while the fluid drains via said long needle into large bottles that unfortunately end up resembling apple cider. "So, you live around here?"

**Cross-cover entails dealing with acute (and sometimes subacute) issues that arise on other teams' patients overnight when you as the on-call team are the only ones in the hospital. This can range from ordering cough syrup or a late dinner tray to transferring a crumping patient to the ICU. I've got a great story about just such a crumping patient, but we'll save that for another day.