Retrospective: Behind the Scenes

Above: The food service staff hidden in this shot from Scrubs. (ABC)

"OUT ON THE EDGE YOU CAN SEE ALL THE THINGS
YOU CAN'T SEE FROM THE CENTER."
- Kurt Vonnegut (Novelist)

I’m practically hooked on medical shows like Doogie Howser, M.D., St. Elsewhere, or even comedic favorite Scrubs (if you haven't noticed already). However, I notice that many times the focus is on the clinical (what I think many people interpret as the most interesting), and not so much on what’s supporting the medical staff. It reminded me of an experience I had back before college...

2003. My final summer in Chicago before I set off for the University of Illinois. I’ll be honest, I wanted to do something that summer, and I considered working at Eagle Country Market (It was an easy job because nobody went to the one near my house) and Best Buy (I thought it was so cool to sell computers back then). However, my mom had a better idea: why don’t I get to work at a hospital? I already wanted to become a doctor – although my reasons weren’t as defined as they are now – so I thought this was a great opportunity.

Just to let you know, I don’t come from a family of doctors. My dad has been focused on business, although my mom is my closest link to anything medically related by working in food service. Although she helped land me my first job in a hospital, my role wasn't anywhere close to being related to medicine...

My job was to work the storeroom at a food service department of a hospital on Chicago's north side. Day in and day out that summer, I took care of deliveries coming into the hospital and stacked the shelves. I was held to the same standards as everyone else in the department (including the cooks and the dishwashers), wore the same uniforms, and paid exactly the same too. I realized the latter when I got a check, and for all that work and expectation, I didn’t think I could support my education – and even my life – with that amount. I now understood that “labored work” actually made handling my finances a quite "labored" too.

But I met some amazing people from within the staff, who have worked at the hospital through many years, some at a dish machine, those at a steel boiler, and some at the tray line. They’ve been supportive of me to this day of my medical journey. I also had the pleasure of working with those outside of the staff, such as the delivery men who came in everyday. I remember one man from a local meat supplier who always wanted me to wear a jacket as I was packing the meat freezer. He said that he ended up having joint problems after years of working in them. As much as I loved his advice, I still went in without the extra layer: sometimes, I just needed the cold to refresh myself from a day's work.

At the hospital, my job duties did vary. Sometimes, I was pulled in for secretarial duties, when they were available. Some of the stuff I created still stands today, seven years later, such as the menu for the coffee shop in the adjacent retirement home and a few signs in the storeroom I got to put up reminding people to always take the stuff off the shelf date first. Other times, I was called to help out for special occasions, such as an employee barbecue, where I had to help drag a large steel grill piece by piece out to the courtyard and then flip burgers for hundreds of employees. It felt good that I was able to help out the hospital by being able to branch off from the store room. I think it was for that reason people just started call me the "floater."

I look back upon the job now, and my mom really taught me a lot of plethora of lessons that summer through helping me get that job, and I really appreciated it. These people - everyone from the people running the food service, the volunteers assisting the patients, the maintenance people making sure everything is in order – are hard-working people that are people who should be truly appreciated for making such a big operation run as smoothly as it possibly can. Doctors and nurses not the only ones working hard and breaking sweats: there’s others behind the scenes also contributing toward a hospital’s mission to care for those who need it.

When I become a doctor, I hope to be as appreciative as possible of the work that these men and women do. So the next time you turn on the TV, take a moment and focus on the people that are around the doctors and the nurses… without them the hospital setting would not be successful enough to create a full-fledged comedy or drama in a prime timeslot around it.