A Random Header Image
17th March 2008

this and that

posted in Uncategorized |

So, I was right on my call night predictions. I’ve had such good call nights so far that I knew I was due for a doozy (I swear, I never used to be superstitious before!). We had 3 ICU admissions, my senior medical student’s patient almost coded on her and was transferred to the unit, where I once again was reminded how much I dislike this hospital and their “whatever strikes their fancy” way of managing patients. We attempted to get a consult to prevent this patient from actually dying on us… when my student is explaining what happened to this particular consultant, his response: “I don’t believe you” over and over again. !!!!! She told me of this particular conversation after she hung up with him or I seriously would have had some words with him. My med student is awesome. As a med student, I so would have had my senior call, but she pluckily does so without a complaint. Luckily this patient didn’t die and when the consultant finally dragged his lazy butt to the hospital the next morning, he agreed that the patient was sick and needed urgent intervention. Ya think? Stories like this, has, unfortunately, been a frequent occurrence. *sigh* Patient, by the way, is doing well.

Chris ended up not coming into town, because he wouldn’t be able to see me. Yay! Now, I’m trying to figure out when our schedule actually match up, which is of course impossible. His free weekend don’t line up with mine. I do have a few actual weekends off coming up in April, May and June, so hopefully, we’ll figure out something. I haven’t had more than a 5 minute conversation with him in months, so I don’t know what we’d talk about for an entire weekend now anyway (I kid).

I slept about 4 hours or so on call and then went and taught Sunday School. Now that was an experience! I was slurring and mispronouncing all kinds of words and I think I repeated myself a couple of times. Luckily, I had had enough time to go home and shower and actually dress up for church so I didn’t look as exhausted as I felt. I came home and crashed by 6 and didn’t wake up until almost 8 this morning. And I still feel tired. It’s rather amazing how my body gets “unused” to being on call and up all night when I go a few weeks without doing so. Going back to the horrors of neuro call in April is not going to be fun.

In other news, the hospital that I work for has established a new policy that all clinic notes have to be done with a month or they start docking from paychecks. Now, for residents this doesn’t matter because 1), they hardly pay us anything because they bill it as 40 hours a week rather than than 80 that we really work and 2) it’s not a real paycheck, it’s a stipend as if I was doing a summer internship selling alarm systems.

But it does matter for the attendings, so all of a sudden, they’ve been down our backs on getting the clinic notes completed. Which is all fine and dandy, except because of the way that the clinic schedules are set up, there is no time to get the notes done and as I mentioned, I already work 80 hours a week (well except this month. I think I’m closer to forty hours, which is insane when you think about it. On my slow month, I’m working as much as the average American and I feel bored. THIS IS HOW THEY HAVE BRAINWASHED ME. Anyway, continuing…) and I get testy about devoting more time to paperwork. Since I am on a cozy rotation this month, I figured I’d better get them done so I can get some peace. I completed 13 already today and have another 9 to go. Yay progress! Of course I have 5 patients that I’m to see tomorrow morning, so I’ll be promptly behind again, but let me bask in my accomplishment for a minute here.

No repeat episodes with possessed, crazed doorbells to report, thank goodness. I’m finally sleeping with the lights off again…

This entry was posted on Monday, March 17th, 2008 at 10:23 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Leave a Reply

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

  • Julia’s Journal

  • Just an ordinary girl.
  • Archives

  • RSS Red Head Snippet

    • Books read October-December 01/01/2024
      My goal was to read 120 books this year. I just finished number 129. (Some of these I reviewed as part of my WWW posts). October: Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt. I had high expectations for this book, as it had been so praised, and I felt let down by it. Still enjoyable, […]