It’s so hard going to bed after a day off… Going to bed means the day has ended and tomorrow another day at work begins.

I’m worn out from work. I’ve been carrying 8-10 patients for a week now, discharging one, only to collect another 3…or a bouceback, a patient that I had only just discharged. The Q3 call (call every three nights) for 3 straight calls bled me dry and I’m only now recovering, only to face another call (my last!) on Wednesday. All things come to an end… Thursday will be the end of this rotation, just in time for me to move back to neurology with the three pagers and even more painful calls. (But on the plus side, another 2+ weeks in the NICU! yay!)

I tried to spend the day doing things around the house, namely scrapping paint off the wall again. It is excruciatingly slow, and I’m getting frustrated. I want to be done! I want my room to be pretty and painted brightly in one color that I picked out, not still finding deeper layers of paint below the salmon pink.

Plus, Chris is coming to visit in a week. One week from tomorrow. Guh. How could it have come up so quickly? He’s doing an interview tour, and I’ll only get to spend like twenty minutes with him, but it’s twenty minutes more than the usual. He’ll stay the night on Tuesday and hopefully find someway to entertain himself while I’m at work and then we’ll meet up before he takes off for the next destination. I’m hoping to get off early… I found out the exact days he was coming too late and I can’t get the day off. The plan is to then meet him in Chicago for the weekend…. I’ve avoided going to Chicago like the plague, but I don’t think I’m going to be successful this time. Anybody with any suggestions of what to do there?

In any case, I want things ready when he comes, show off my pretty house, and that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. *sigh*

Nonmedical update on the rest of my life upcoming, I promise.

I’m sleep deprived and about to become even more sleep deprived, as I head into another call night (and have to be at work at 6. Yes, that’s six and a half hours from now).

But the thought has crossed my mind the last several days…

I am honestly, truly, completely happy here. Still lonely at times, but I’m making friends and I (mostly) like my job. I’m settling, and it’s becoming home.

Maybe this will keep me going for the next 48 hours. 🙂

It’s probably wrong to be interested in my medical student.

The med student that I’m responsible for, look after, teach, who looks up at me with adoring eyes because I impart so much knowledge *snerk*.

Wrong. Very wrong.

That’s why I’m not.

Nope, not at all.

*goes back to daydreaming* In two weeks, I won’t be his intern… ooo, possibilities.

BTW, my presentation? That I’ve spent most of the week fretting/working on? Trashed. It somehow got corrupted this morning. Fabulous. So it’s going to be a long night. Bah.

I think this may be the most stressed out I’ve ever been.

Added 4 more patients to my clinic notes that I need to write up. That makes 11 from the last three weeks.

Two (hopefully three!) discharges tomorrow. Need to have all of the paperwork done early in the morning to scoot them out of here. And then dictated.

Still have at least 15 hospital discharge summaries to dictate.

Just discovered that I’m slated to give the noon lecture on Friday. Chief residents want the presentation by tomorrow. Tomorrow.

We’re on call for day time admissions again tomorrow–most likely will get three patients. And we’re on call on Friday (that time we can get six patients). I’m on call again on Saturday (5 pts). And next Tuesday (ditto). And next Friday (ditto). And the Tuesday after that (ditto).

Please tell me where I have the time to catch up!!

It’s always a delight to end one’s day at work at 9 pm (on a non call day), with just enough time to race home, eat something and post a little rant on the blog.

Knowning that you’ve got to be in bed by ten, so you can wake up and be at work by 5:30 to finish all of those patient progress notes that you never got to do today, because you were so busy writing orders and taking to social work about how one takes away power of attorney or discussing G-Tubes with GI or transferring very very sick patient from the ICU because there are people more ill than he, needing that bed…. only to have his oxygen saturation drop dangerously low and send me fleeing to his bedside, where we realized that even if he was suffering for what I thought he had (pulmonary embolism) I couldn’t check for it or even treat it. Just hoping that he makes it through the night.

Plus I have to see all of my patients, including the sick ones, have their notes written and have a plan before I go to clinic at 8. And discuss it with my other intern/medical student, so they can present it to the team. And then, I’ll spend the rest of the day completely lost on what exactly we decided to do, because I wasn’t there.

And did I mention that I behind on my dictations? Something like 15 dictations, since we’ve had such a patient turnover. And I’ve got 6 clinic patients notes to finish (plus the 3-4 that I’ll see tomorrow morning.) So there’s going to be a fair number more hours spent here.

Just in cause any of you were considering medicine…. don’t.

ETA: Special hugs to shirerain and bjorks_defender I know that it’s been very hard times for you and I haven’t been around or as supportive as I should have been. Know that you’re are in my thoughts and prayers and very close to my heart. {{{TIGHT EMBRACE}}}}

I feel like a second class citizen today. For the first time since I turned 18, I didn’t vote.

I tried, oh how I did try. First it was getting an absentee ballot from Salt Lake… but I found out that I sent it to the wrong district’s office and it had to be forwarded on, so I didn’t end up getting the request made by the deadline of last Friday.

Then I found out that I could register to vote at the voting polls today. Yay! I busted my hiney to get everything in line, double checked on my patients, wrote all my orders… but we were admitting and my last admit took 3 hours to do…. then another half hour to finish things up… then another 20 minutes signing out to the on-call resident.

I was ten minutes late.

The joys of being in medicine.

I heard that other senior residents let their juniors leave for a short time so they could exercise their patriotic duty. Not mine, of course. Because that would mean he’d actually have to do some work and we couldn’t possibly have that.