Where medicine meets humanity
Behind the Scrubs
Reflections on the humor, pressure, emotions, and workplace rituals that rarely make it into medical textbooks – but quietly shape life behind the scenes and the people who care for others.
The things that once filled us with excitement often become the ones we stop noticing. Sometimes nothing has changed – except our perspective.
Read reflection › Sometimes the words people invent at work reveal more about a profession—and the people behind it – than any textbook ever could.
Read reflection › Never say, "It's quiet today." Healthcare professionals know exactly why. Everyone else is about to find out.
Read reflection › Behind the Scrubs
The Most Excited Employee in the Building
When I first started working at a veterinary hospital, I was probably the most excited person there, which was impressive considering my job involved cleaning kennels, folding towels, helping the groomers, and discovering that one wet dog can somehow soak an entire room.
I loved everything about the hospital. I loved my scrubs, my badge, the busy hallways, and the medical words I barely understood but fully intended to pretend I did. If a veterinarian asked me to help with something, I felt as though I had been personally selected for a highly classified mission.
At that point, even small things felt important. A new task made my day. Being trusted with something outside my usual duties felt like a promotion. I noticed everything because everything was new.
A few years later, the same hospital felt completely ordinary. The hallways were just hallways. The badge was something I forgot at home. The mysterious medical language had become background noise, and the excitement I once felt seemed to have disappeared.
For a while, I thought the job had changed. In reality, I had simply become used to it.
That happens in life more often than we realize. The home we once dreamed about becomes the place where the laundry lives. The relationship that once felt exciting becomes a discussion about groceries. Even the life we worked hard to build can quietly turn into something we barely notice.
Familiarity makes life easier, but it also has a talent for making good things invisible.
Sometimes we do not need a completely new life. We just need to remember what once made the old one feel special.
What made you ridiculously excited on your first day at work?
Behind the Scrubs
Cancelectomy
Every profession has its own language.
Lawyers have expressions that make no sense to anyone outside the courtroom. Pilots speak in abbreviations. IT professionals casually suggest that you "turn it off and on again."
Surgery has cancelectomy.
It's not a real medical procedure, although on particularly busy mornings, many of us secretly wish it were.
If you've never worked in surgery, let me explain.
Every morning begins the same way. Someone updates the whiteboard with the day's schedule. Every procedure, every surgeon, every patient is listed there. Before anyone has finished their coffee, the entire team has already walked over to look at it.
That whiteboard tells you almost everything you need to know about your day.
A board with a comfortable number of cases usually earns a quiet nod of approval. A board filled from top to bottom, with emergency cases squeezed into every available space, has a different effect. You don't even need to say anything. Everyone does the same silent calculation: How many surprises will today have in store? When are we going to eat? Are we leaving on time?
And then someone says it.
"Maybe we'll get a little cancelectomy today."
Nobody means they hope a patient becomes too sick for surgery. Nobody wants anyone's plans to fall apart. Quite the opposite. Every cancellation usually represents someone whose operation had to be postponed, often because of circumstances nobody wanted.
The joke isn't about patients.
It's about capacity.
It's about the tiny, guilty feeling of relief that appears when an impossibly full day suddenly becomes... slightly less impossible.
Healthcare professionals rarely admit that feeling out loud because it sounds wrong. We chose professions built around helping others. Relief can easily be mistaken for indifference.
But the two are not the same.
Feeling relieved doesn't mean you care less. More often, it means you've been carrying more than your nervous system was ever designed to carry. After hours of making decisions, solving problems, adapting to the unexpected, and giving your full attention to everyone else, even one cancelled case can feel like someone quietly handed you back a few minutes to breathe.
That's one of the things I find fascinating about workplace humor. The funniest jokes often reveal the hardest truths. They become a safe way of saying things that would otherwise feel uncomfortable. They allow people to acknowledge something difficult without turning it into a dramatic conversation.
Cancelectomy isn't really about cancelled surgeries.
It's about the invisible weight that healthcare professionals carry every day while continuing to show up, care deeply, and do their best for every patient. It's about trying to do your best for every patient while quietly hoping the day gives you just enough room to breathe. Sometimes the healthiest thing a team can do is laugh together at a word that doesn't exist.
Because sometimes one made-up word tells you more about a profession than an entire textbook ever could.
Behind the Scrubs
We Don't Say "Quiet"
Every workplace has its own unwritten rules. In healthcare, one of them is surprisingly simple.
You never say, "It's quiet today."
You can think it. You can whisper it to yourself. But under no circumstances should you say it out loud. Because the moment those words leave your mouth, someone will inevitably glance at you as though you've personally summoned three emergency surgeries, a crashing patient, and a power outage.
Nobody actually believes the sentence causes chaos. Mostly...
The funny thing is that almost every hospital seems to have its own version of this superstition. In some places, it's the word quiet. Somewhere else, it's turning off every machine in the OR before the shift is over because, somehow, that guarantees an emergency case will arrive five minutes later. Every team has its own little rituals for negotiating with fate.
Of course, none of them make any logical sense. And yet somehow... people still follow them.
I've always found that fascinating.
Healthcare is a profession built around preparation. We train, we study, we create protocols, we double-check medications, we sterilize instruments, and we plan for every scenario we can imagine. And then life politely ignores the plan.
An emergency arrives. A routine surgery becomes complicated. A patient surprises everyone.
No matter how experienced you are, uncertainty is part of the job description. Maybe that's why these tiny superstitions survive.
Not because we truly believe they control the day, but because they make uncertainty feel just a little more familiar. They give us something to smile about while we wait to see what happens next.
The truth is, we all do this, even outside the hospital.
We wear the "lucky" shirt before an important interview. We refuse to celebrate too early because we don't want to "jinx it." We knock on wood. We cross our fingers.
We laugh at ourselves while doing it... and then do it anyway.
Maybe these little rituals aren't really about changing reality. Maybe they're about calming the part of us that wishes life came with a little more certainty than it does.
So yes, if you ever visit a hospital and someone tells you not to say, "It's quiet today," just smile and play along.
Because in healthcare, there are some risks that simply aren't worth taking.
What about your workplace? Does your profession have an unwritten rule, superstition, or ritual that everyone follows – even if nobody can quite explain why?
