Misfortune, Mistake, or Malfeasance? A Tool to Hone Outside of Radiology

I could probably count on one hand the number of times I have taken a vacation trip during the summer. It’s my favorite season where I live. Heading elsewhere would be counterproductive. I get away in colder months and usually seek locales with sunny warmth.

There are, however, a bunch of destinations, such as northern Europe, I would never see with this approach. Vague notions I had about addressing that began to take shape a couple of years ago during our last total solar eclipse: The next one was to be this August in Iceland. It was as good a reason as any to go there.

My lady and I are not big into tours. We like to research points of interest for ourselves, rent a car, and do things on our own terms. That is not always the best approach. Iceland summers, for instance, are notoriously fickle in terms of weather. A sunny day can turn overcast and even stormy in the blink of an eye. The tour’s local people, most familiar with onsite meteorological quirks, would be best equipped to know where to bring us for eclipse viewing on the day of.

Figuring that was better than guessing on our own and encouraged by strong online reviews of previous outings from this tour group, we plunked down considerable coin to reserve our spot over a year in advance. Fast forward to earlier this month and the outcome was a mixed bag.

Iceland is Iceland, and nothing short of a natural disaster would be able to mar that. Glaciers, volcanos, puffins, and local cuisine are all there for visitors to enjoy.

A tour can make these things even more accessible, or it can get in the way. Ours had a recurring theme of the latter. It was nothing catastrophic but there was an increasing amount of murmuring on the bus as disappointments accumulated. Time available at some destinations was foreshortened and other stops were eliminated entirely.

Nobody would differ on the objective details. The walking tour of location X, listed in the itinerary, either happened or it didn’t. The bus was either on time or showed up an hour late. It is only when forming one’s interpretation of things that subjectivity enters the picture. I found myself thinking of that as the “misfortune, mistake or malfeasance” game.

Playing it entails sizing up a less-than situation and deciding what caused it. Misfortune is just bad luck, which is out of anyone’s control. Mistakes are when folks’ performance is innocently suboptimal. Malfeasance is when their shortfall is due to laziness, greed, or another ulterior motive. There is a gray zone between the latter two categories; one might argue about whether they should have done better as opposed to could have.

By example, the fact that eclipse day was overcast and we didn’t get a picture-perfect view was misfortune. I can’t blame that on the tour guides. If anything, they might have salvaged a bit by choosing our viewing spot, because during the key hour, the clouds got relatively thin and one could intermittently see the vanishing sun. Who knows if we could have seen as much anywhere else?

Others might be less forgiving, insisting that there must have been some other spot that did better, or at least equal but less of a drive (we rode three hours each way). That would be a claim of “mistake” I suppose. I can’t believe anyone would accuse the guides of worse.

Going a step further, nobody should want to do so. The more often your appraisals skew towards the malfeasance end of the spectrum, the unhappier a person you wind up seeming and, effectively, being. You are essentially choosing to have less of a good time.

This was illustrated on the bus. Folks more inclined to blame the tour company, if not the guides themselves, appeared to enjoy the week less. Even if they complained in good humor, just maintaining a focus on what wasn’t going well seemed to function like a joy antagonist if I might borrow from pharmacology terms.

Why dwell in excessive negativity if it is not to your net gain? I am of a mind to do the opposite. If I can be more charitable in my assessments, it gives me less reason to feel resentment and all that goes with it.

I find it useful to practice the misfortune/mistake/malfeasance game as often as I can. Life is easy to compartmentalize. One might, for instance, be able to cheerily roll with the punches while on vacation but maintain a far more demanding attitude while at work. If you get in the habit of playing the game, it can eventually penetrate areas of your thinking that might otherwise resist it.

Radiology is, after all, serious business. You are dealing with people’s health and well-being. A bad outcome can mean loss of life/limb while bad performance from a tour guide might mean you had 10 minutes less to ooh and ahh over the puffins than you should have had. Disappointing, yes, but nowhere near the same ballpark.

Even without an identifiable impact on patient outcome, any given mishap can spark imagination of how things could have gone worse and probably will if whatever went wrong is allowed to repeat itself in future. Or, departing entirely from clinical matters: When health care is your career, things happening now can potentially shape your livelihood for years, even decades to come.

As a result, when wearing one’s doctor hat, it might come more naturally to skew towards blaming others of malfeasance, even if only in one’s thoughts. They should have done this instead of that, or done whatever they did better, and there is no excuse for the contrary. That can go for anything from how they read a scan to how they comported themselves as a professional to how they transacted with partners or employees.

If you try telling someone in that environment “Hey, you need to lighten up,” that might not go very far. Even if they recognize the need in themselves, making a substantive change can be like a personality overhaul.

On the other hand, if you nibble at the edges and get accustomed to such lightening outside of the medical world first — for instance, when on vacations or during other extracurricular activities at home — it has a chance to seep into your overall approach. Your radiologist-self has a better chance of marinating in this less condemning environment. There needn’t be a sudden epiphany, a la Scrooge on Christmas morning.