When You Get Blamed
Did you ever get blamed for something that you did not do and when you defend yourself, no one believes you?When I obtained my very first full-time job as a surgical assistant for a well established successful oral surgeon, I experienced an accusation, that almost cost me my job. You see, I was all of 19 and worked with another woman who was about 36. She had gone to school to be a surgical assistant while I was in nursing school just learning on the job. The doctor trained me quite well on how to set up surgical trays and assist him in surgery. When I worked with this particular woman, for some reason she wanted to show off that she knew how to do everything and I was just a kid learning.
Over the next few weeks, there were many mistakes in tray sets ups. When we got to the surgery, the wrong size instruments would be on the table making the circulating nurse have to go out and get the correct instrument. The doctor became furious because it was always on my surgical assisting. I could not imagine why the trays were set up wrong as I would set them up per the required instruments on my “cheat sheet.” One day I started to notice that this woman would change my tray and say I had it all wrong and she knew what the doctor needed. I received a warning from the doctor that I was going to be fired if I did not start doing things correctly. I tried to explain, but he did not want to hear anything about it.
I prayed and asked God to help me. Things kept getting worse. One day, the woman announced that she was taking vacation for 2 weeks. The doctor brought in another assistant that only worked part-time for him and asked that she help during her absence. This other assistant came in to help, she was the nicest girl. She watched me set up the trays and complimented me on the speed and organization of the tray and in the order that the doctor would use the instruments. During surgeries the doctor asked who made up the trays and I quietly said I did. He did not say anything more. The 2 weeks passed by and the other woman came back from her vacation. The doctor asked her to make up all the surgical trays from now on and I was to just watch and assist him in surgery only. I thought to myself, okay I am going to be fired over this.
One day I came in to work and the doctor called me in to his office, he asked about my aspirations in life and what I planed to do when I was done with school. I did not know what I wanted to do, but I did say I did want to work with him in surgery and learn. The doctor went on to apologize for doubting my skills, he proceeded to tell me that he had been observing my behavior and that of the other assistant and noticed that she was deliberately messing up my trays to make me look bad. She did this for so long, that when it came time for her to do them on her own, she could not figure out what was the correct set up anymore. She was caught in lies as she told the doctor that I had done the trays and of course the week he had her do them, he knew that was not true.
The moral of this story, pride is a tumor that can eat away at the soul and has to be cut out in order for us not to become bitter angry people. This woman had so much pride in her and did not want a new comer to take away from anything that she was doing at this Doctor’s surgical practice, that she used this incident to hurt me and in the end hurt herself, because she was fired. We all need to check ourselves, the next time you get full of pride, if deep in your heart you feel something tug at you that this is not right, listen to that tugging from God and change your attitude.
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