I’m surprised that I haven’t gotten emails/calls/signal fires asking if I was alive, since I’ve been absent.

Never fear, I’m alive and kicking. I think if I were to die, the medicine department would not stand for it, and would be administering pressors and bagging me in the grave.

I just calculated that I’ve worked 46 of the last 62 hours and that might be an underestimate. I’m tired. I’ve had three patients who when I admitted then a week or so ago, were sick but got turned around with the right antibiotics and fluids and TLC, take a turn for the worse in the last 48 hours. One has already passed away; another is likely to go tonight, the other is holding on by his cranky teeth. The hard thing about taking care of cute but sick 80 year olds (as three fourths of my service is) is that they have a tendency to take a turn for the worse very quickly, as at 80+, they don’t have much reserve left.

We admitted more patient today. I was in clinic all morning, only three patients and I still went over time and had to rush back to the hospital so I could figure out what happened to all of my patients and was confronted by catastrophe after catastrophe. I endured the chastisement of the pulmonary critical care fellow for not getting her involved in the sick patients sooner. I had to urgently call surgery on another patient for them to tell me that it wasn’t urgent after all. Two hours spent updating family members. Another 10 minutes talking about treatment options for cancer with another patient. And so forth. I didn’t even see the patients that we admitted until almost 8 this night, luckily they aren’t too terribly sick, just needing some monitoring tonight.

I’m supposed to have the sister missionaries over for dinner tomorrow night. Luckily they called and reminded me or I would have completely stood them up. I should get done earlier tomorrow, barring any more ICU transfers. Good thing too, because I have no energy tonight for washing dishes and straightening up my living room.

And now that I’ve chugged down my evening meal of cereal, I’m off to bed. To start things all over again tomorrow…

Also, my iPod completely died yesterday morning. Or rather, it started making horrible grunting noises and now displays a sad iPod icon before dying again, which from the website sounds like the sign of ultimate demise. My computer won’t recognize it, I can’t reset it. Call nights are going to be really, really, really long without some tunes.