Sometimes, when I was taking care of patients at a community clinic – whether in Oklahoma or Kansas or Massachusetts or even California – I would get students or assistants of some sort.  Nurses, nursing students, a physician assistant, physician assistant students, students from nearby colleges who are training to be medical assistants, or sometimes some kind of doctor extender I’d never heard of or didn’t understand would be assigned to me or rotate from a pool of available helpers.

Of course, I would always like them to actually get some knowledge from me. Sometimes that was the toughest thing for me to do. They needed to both pay attention and have a few functioning neurons. Although I usually figured out a way to quiz them a bit, they usually seemed, if I ended up running into them days or weeks later, to remember me as the one who was fun and told stories and paid attention to them.

Sometimes, they do remember certain things I would consider “rituals.”  One of my best known rituals is “The standing O” – Literally rising from my desk, applauding and shouting “BRAVO!” if someone did something I considered exceptional.  You know, like a standing ovation for an actor or musician. Read more on “Standing O” For Birth Control…