Total Lack of Self Awareness

Yesterday, Dr Smith, an all around good citizen offered to stay late after a 24 hour shift to help me make rounds on the 50+ patients in the unit. I have to preface this by saying that Dr. Smith practically wrote the text book on high frequency ventilation. There was a resident physician in the unit who has a profound lack of self awareness. We'll call him Dr. Sparrow.
Dr. Smith had reviewed his plan for the ventilation of a difficult patient with me which involved not changing to high frequency ventilation just yet. (I may go into some specifics about HFO in another post for informative purposes). Dr. Sparrow had received check-out from the nurse practitioner on call. As Dr. Smith was reviewing an xray, Dr. Sparrow positioned himself behind him and proceeded to tell me about how this particular patient needed to be switched to high frequency ventilation as the pressures on the conventional ventilator were too high. I reassured him that we were aware of the pressures and had elected to stick with the conventional ventilator for now. Dr. Sparrow then launched into an argumentative statement about the information that he had received at check-out regarding the fact that we must switch ventilators. He stated it as irrefutable fact, obviously reciting verbatim what he had been told at check-out.
To his credit, Dr. Smith didn't offer to produce the original article that he wrote years ago on the subject. He simply stated without turning around, "We hear ya, Boss!" I've been chuckling about it all weekend! God Bless resident education!