The nurse’s guide to MD specialists

General Surgery
If you see a resident asleep in a chair at the nurses’ station, chances are it’s a general surgery resident. They’re horribly underslept, but have a solid working knowledge of where everything ought to go in the body. If you’re a general surgeon, you can take people apart and put them back together with no bits left over. I’ve gotten speech from a few of them that’s beyond “mmmmrrrppphhhh” as I wake them up, but not many.

Endocrinology
Your average endocrinologist has a second brain somewhere in his body, in which he stores minute bits of important information that came from some obscure study in Backobeyondistan five years ago. They will speak to you as equals, even if their conversation about a complex patient eventually sounds to you like “Grobble grobblescrink mmmmREEEE! ppphhhhbt!”

Psychiatry
Well-dressed, with a fondness for expensive shoes and dangling pendants (men and women, respectively). Pleasant, but strange. Psych nurses are nice as well, but strange. You have to be a little odd to work psych and be good at it.

The best illustration of a typical non-psych-nurse and psych-nurse exchange I can come up with is this:

Me (trying to reach a med on a high shelf): “Sometimes I wish I were taller, dammit!”

Psych nurse: “Oh…do you have body image issues?”

This post originally appeared in The Head Nurse blog.