Size really does matter
After doing that tactical medicine course in California, I saw that I had let myself get out of shape. Badly. Well, one of the fellow classmates was a former Navy Corpsman who had been in Marine Recon. He was, naturally, in phenomenal shape. Since I was sitting next to him, at some point, our conversations turned to fitness. He described a program I had never heard of called Crossfit. After the class was over, I was looking at my gut and decided that I would give Crossfit a try for 90 days. Well, while I have not been a very strict adherent to it's schedule, I have lost about twenty pounds, dropped down to a 38 waist, and gotten into much better shape. I still need to drop another twenty pounds. I was 270 (:O !!), and am now 250. I should get down to an ideal of about 230 pounds. While this still puts me into the obese range, I have really slimmed down. So, while I wear a 38" trouser, I am also 6'1," I have gotten into *much* better shape. I can now do five dead hang pull-ups, even though I weigh 250. I also just hit a personal record and did a deadlift of 330 pounds. I also am running 10mph quarter mile sprints as part of my warm-up.
When I was in Chicago, the obviously homosexual guy at the perfume counter started flirting with me (in front of my wife, who was the reason we were there) and asked "So what do you do for a living, lift weights?." I have never before been hit on by a gay man before (and hope I never will be again), so I am guessing that I look pretty buff.
As I started to get into better shape, I also have noticed a few things in my work environment. First, I noticed that nobody gives me $hit. Not to my face. On the phone, the surgical residents are rude, but when I am towering over them, they get polite. More interesting is to note that patients react differently to me. When a drug-seeker (and we seemed to have a lot of them last night) comes in, and I present them with an itemized list of their abuses of the system, and tell them that not only will I not give them narcotics, and reward their behavior, but I will dictate a note stating that I advise other physicians not give them narcotics, they just say "okay," and then depart without a fight. Last night, I saw a patient who had visited a couple of weeks ago, and gave one of the polite female attendings a hard time. The patient was abbusive, disruptive, demanding, and generally a pain in the a$$. When I went in and told her "SIT. DOWN." She would shut up, sit down, and behave. When male patients come in and start becoming abusive of my nurses, they settle down quick when I start standing behind that same sweet little nurse and stare at them like they owe me money.
As much as we like to talk about hhow cerebral and enlightened medicine is, when it comes down to the actual practice of medicine in the trenches, the fact of the matter is that size really does matter.
Anyway, I have to get to my next shift, where the size works against me. I am working in pediatrics, and my sheer size is enough to make children start crying. I try to be non-threatening to them, but when somebody who looks like a possible prison convict comes in, and starts reaching for them with strange looking instruments in their hands, they get terrified, and then they start screaming and crying.
Respectfully Submitted,
-doc Russia