September 24, 2008

• Call on me

  
  
  

  
  

  
  You know, its pretty darn amazing what people can teach themselves to put up with. Another post call day, during which I admitted 5 patients overnight, one of who had the nerve to try and have a heart attack during the first and only time I got to go sit in the bed.

  Honestly the nerve of some people.

  Aside from that, it was not a bad call…everyone was admitted after midnight, so i didnt have to write any progress notes on them this morning, and i had copies of the history and physical ready for morning report and even managed to find time to read up on some of their conditions. All on less than 2 hours of sleep.

  The post call day, in fact the entire call process is one of the classic trial by fire/hazing rituals left of old school medicine. And as much as physicians like to complain about it, I think it makes us pretty darn proud of ourselves on some level too. After all, aside from medicine and the military, no other job has the expectation that you will be running on your reserves not just once, but rather on a repeated basis for an indefinite amount of time.

  Of course there is some serious REM debt to be repaid later. During a brief nap today, I dreamt that my team and I were in the hospital (i know another dream about working, its sickening)

  In my dream hospital, there was a cricket that could either cause or cure disease. A wooden cricket. And a government conspiracy was involved somehow. So our team had to find this cricket, but we had 12 patients and we didnt know which one it was in, and we only had 30 minutes to find it or something would happen.

  And thats actually a pretty good description of my mental state at 4in the morning. One that followed by the slightly less intelligent waking thought that the housekeeping rainbow dusters look a lot like those tricolor rocket pops from the 80′s

  Alright, time to get some sleep before I wake up and return to the hospital (which I technically havent left yet) tomorrow

   

  • 4:06 pm
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