- 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)
