Made it through my first night on call...

So I'm post call today. Went in at 5am on Tuesday and got out at 10am on Wednesday. The only sleep I got was from when I dozed off while an attending was talking to me.

Honestly, that was one of the most brutal days I've ever spent in a hospital. Even the free food wasn't enough to keep me going. Luckily, my second year resident turned out to be pretty cool, so I think it's gonna be an alrite month.

My duties seemed easy enough. We had about 15 patients on our service and on average got 1-2 new patients every hour. My job was to log all the labs on the patients, see them every 6 hours and jot a quick note on them. I had to make sure everyone was ready for surgery (PT/INR, x-rays, EKG), write post-op notes, etc. In addition, I had to write all orders, admits, etc. Outside of the service, I was in charge of the wound care clinic in the jail ward.

Actually, now that I write it out, it sounds bloody easy. Really, the only part that made it complicated was that I'm really slow. The hospital is huge, ~15 stories, and the elevators don't work that well, so there was a fair amount of stair climbing involved. I had to cross cover for the non-trauma/general surgery service, so I looked like batman with all the pagers on me. hmm...I think that was what got to me. Every time I tried to get something done, I'd get paged for something. Seriously, the nurses in my part of emergency are awesome. They really take care of me. In other parts of the hospital, there were definitely power struggles. I readily admit that I'm their bitch. They'd have me run across the hospital up 10 flights of stairs because a form didn't have the patient's name stamped on it. Seriously...you could just write the patient's name for me. Lots of little things like that kept me from keeping up with patient care.

One of the tougher parts of being a newly minted doctor was having a title, but no power. Actually, I guess it's the same for all doctors. We've got some pretty sick guys on our service. There's a young guy with AIDs, a huge brain mass, crazy fluid in his lungs and we had to remove his colon because he got a massive C. dif infection. He is my age, DNR/DNI palliative care aka let die status. I don't think he knows what's going on. Every time I go in, he just looks at me and mouths "help me." I can't do shit, except feel bad and give him some more morphine. Then it's off to see the next patient. There isn't enough time to transition mentally/emotionally like a normal human being between patients.

One day and I'm completely drained. I came home and crashed. Eight hours went by, but it felt like a blink of the eye.

I can see why the 80 hour work week was instituted. By the end of my shift, I kept making mistakes on my patient's notes, kept writing the wrong ID numbers and lab values. In addition, I just got slower and slower. It was a pretty painful night. I'm glad that I get tomorrow off. I think my resident took pity on me.

-bender