Excuse me, nurse...

“Hold on honey, the nurse just walked into the room and wants to tell me something.”

My patient hung up the phone with her husband. And I introduced myself as her doctor again, for the 4th time.

I was helping get a patient onto the CT table to determine if they are a candidate for a procedure. And I get pulled to the side by one of the medics who had transported the patient. He asks me to sign something, something that says the patient arrived and we assumed care, while the nurses hook the patient onto our monitors and drips. And after I ask if I’m allowed to sign (because I typically don’t), and he takes it back to look at it then the question. "You’re an RN right?"

Now for those of you who don’t know me, I’m 5’2, female, and have been told I’m relatively young appearing (when I have my hair dyed). And apparently in today’s society that is code for nurse.

Now let me preface my reaction with this. I love a lot of RN’s. Most of my best friends are RNs, hell most of all my friends are RNs. And I could not do what they do. I do not have that kind of patience or skill set required for that kind of bedside care. I truly hope they all know how much respect I have for the care they give to our patients. But I am not an RN. I spent 4 years in undergrad followed by 4 years of med school followed by 7 years of residency and now 1 year into fellowship. I have worked very hard and against many odds to get to where I am. I have made so many sacrifices to get to where I am at. And I have so many more ahead of me.

Now I took the implicit bias class in residency. What are the assumptions we make due to our childhood, education, parental exposure, etc that we don’t even realize we are making. I’m also in the middle of an amazing book Untamed by Glennon Doyle about the taming of ourselves in the context of society.

Well apparently one of them is male = doctor, female = nurse. And as women we are tamed to accept that truth.

And I correct them, saying no MD….for the 3rd or 4th time. But at some point does it stop?

I know my male colleague has never had that question posed to him. In fact no one even asks for his signature. He doesn’t routinely get yelled at “nurse” while he walks by a patient room. Is there a point that I no longer have to stand up and say I am a doctor every time I walk into a room? In all my insecurities in life and challenges I will see in my life, I fully admit this is minor. If this were the worst of it, then I am the luckiest person I can imagine. But what if this just the basis for all the other gender-related bias. I know it’s a pervasive undertone that exists in my every day. I see it more now then I have in the other places I have lived and worked. Now I’m not talking about in a Handmaid’s Tale kind of way that is threatening to my ability to do my job. But it does exist. On a nearly daily basis Ihave to declare what I do or rather decline what I don’t do.

So the next time you see someone and assume they have a job based on gender roles, maybe you’ll stop and think. Do we really need to ascribe to that line of thinking anymore? Rather then assume, could you just ask what is your title or what do you do? You may be surprised who runs the world. (Was Beyonce right? Is it girls?)

And perhaps you will learn a little about how our society truly runs, rather then what our patriarchal history would have you believe.