A night in the life...
Mar. 20th, 2010 04:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aquinasprimeThis is a long and probably rambling post I wrote yesterday while in the San Francisco airport waiting to get on the third and final plane for the Hawai'i trip. I was thinking about what it's like to be on call and thought I'd share. I was running on minimal sleep so I apologize now for any bad writing.
A night in the life.
It can be somewhat surreal, being on call. It’s a very odd day for me. In my group your type of call depends on what day it is and at which of our sites you are taking call. Only one of our sites requires that we be in house for call and that is the only site where we have our post-call day off. In order to make my noon flight today, I was on call at that site. If it’s not a weekend, we take call from 4pm - 7am. This means my day starts off on a different but beneficial schedule - I wake up just before 7 and wake up the princess while P showers. I normally leave the house before she’s awake, so this is always a treat. Then I lounge around the house in my pajamas until about 11ish, when I go back to bed and try to sleep until 2. I get up, shower, eat a late lunch, pack my dinner and leave the house around 3:30 pm. For the remainder of my post I’ll be using military time (mostly because that’s what we use in the hospital).
Once I get to work, I look at the board and try to figure out who’s coordinating. Generally I get assigned to 2 rooms or 1 room and OB. Last night was pretty typical. Nearly every thing was finishing up when I arrived, by 1800ish everything was done and I had sent everyone home but the late resident. Then the fun starts. I get a call from a resident wanting to know about timing of doing a case - the child ate at x time, when can we do the surgery. They don’t really like my answer, so we go back and forth about the time - can it be done at 7:30, how about 6, does the surgeon want to bump himself in the am, etc. Finally after going back and forth for about 45 min, they decide to declare it an emergency. So I call the fellow back in from home and we’re working until about 2300. I eat my dinner around 2000, while watching a hockey game and surfing the net on my laptop using the hosptial wi-fi. I go in to check on things around 2115 and hear the dulcet tones of the surgeon “yelling” at his resident. I put yelling in quotes because he has two volumes - mumbling and 11. But he’s really good at what he does.
I try to lay down in the call room. My DH decides to text me at 23:30pm because he wasn’t thinking clearly. I go back to sleep. I get paged at 0020 for a case we need to do. OB is slow so I ask the resident to do it instead of the fellow (we’re busy the next day and if the fellow works after midnight, they have to give her off the next day and we’re too short of people for that). The resident’s excited because its a cool case. Too bad we don’t start it for nearly anhour. I text the husband for revenge. I go back to our office/lounge and whip out the laptop again, intending to check my email and take a nap. I get lost in some Star Wars fan fic and its 0215 and the resident is calling me tellling me that they’re done. Thank god. I get back to the call room by 0230 and sleep until my alarm wakes me up at 0630. I head to L & D to see if they’ve given the resident any business last night, which they haven’t. The were just calling him for an epidural, so I hang out, sign the paperwork and head downstairs.
I was asked when I showed up to start my call if I could stay and start a few cases to get the day going, I’d only be there about an hour late. Whatever. Of course I head to the or desk and find out we now have an emergency case that needs to bump something. As I’m the only attending there, I get to pick what gets bumped. The fellow is paged and sets up the room. I see the patient and get the case started. At 0800 they let me leave.
I got 4 hours of uninterrupted “sleep” which really isn’t bad for where I work. I survived with no c-sections (not even they typical 0200 one we get). But sleep on call isn’t really sleep. It doesn’t matter if I’m in house or taking call from home. I could get 10 hours of “sleep” on call and I’d still be better off with five hours not on call in my own bed. The problem with sleeping on call is that I don’t let my body fully relax or go into a truly deep sleep. I’m always waiting for the pager to go off, the phone to ring. And if I actually go to sleep and wake up the first thing I instinctively do is look at the clock and check to make sure the pager is on. I think I slept better when the princess was first home from the hospital and nursing every 3ish hours then I do when on call.
And God forbid I have to do anything the next day. If I’m lucky, I can go home, eat a small breakfast and try and sleep until noon. That’s the key to getting back on schedule - if I sleep past noon, I won’t be able to sleep that night. Of course it could be worse, I could still be doing a week of nights at a time like I did in residency.
And do you know what the worst part is? I wouldn't change a thing.
Sorry if I’m long winded and rambling, I’m running on four hour of call sleep plus an hour of napping on the plane.
A night in the life.
It can be somewhat surreal, being on call. It’s a very odd day for me. In my group your type of call depends on what day it is and at which of our sites you are taking call. Only one of our sites requires that we be in house for call and that is the only site where we have our post-call day off. In order to make my noon flight today, I was on call at that site. If it’s not a weekend, we take call from 4pm - 7am. This means my day starts off on a different but beneficial schedule - I wake up just before 7 and wake up the princess while P showers. I normally leave the house before she’s awake, so this is always a treat. Then I lounge around the house in my pajamas until about 11ish, when I go back to bed and try to sleep until 2. I get up, shower, eat a late lunch, pack my dinner and leave the house around 3:30 pm. For the remainder of my post I’ll be using military time (mostly because that’s what we use in the hospital).
Once I get to work, I look at the board and try to figure out who’s coordinating. Generally I get assigned to 2 rooms or 1 room and OB. Last night was pretty typical. Nearly every thing was finishing up when I arrived, by 1800ish everything was done and I had sent everyone home but the late resident. Then the fun starts. I get a call from a resident wanting to know about timing of doing a case - the child ate at x time, when can we do the surgery. They don’t really like my answer, so we go back and forth about the time - can it be done at 7:30, how about 6, does the surgeon want to bump himself in the am, etc. Finally after going back and forth for about 45 min, they decide to declare it an emergency. So I call the fellow back in from home and we’re working until about 2300. I eat my dinner around 2000, while watching a hockey game and surfing the net on my laptop using the hosptial wi-fi. I go in to check on things around 2115 and hear the dulcet tones of the surgeon “yelling” at his resident. I put yelling in quotes because he has two volumes - mumbling and 11. But he’s really good at what he does.
I try to lay down in the call room. My DH decides to text me at 23:30pm because he wasn’t thinking clearly. I go back to sleep. I get paged at 0020 for a case we need to do. OB is slow so I ask the resident to do it instead of the fellow (we’re busy the next day and if the fellow works after midnight, they have to give her off the next day and we’re too short of people for that). The resident’s excited because its a cool case. Too bad we don’t start it for nearly anhour. I text the husband for revenge. I go back to our office/lounge and whip out the laptop again, intending to check my email and take a nap. I get lost in some Star Wars fan fic and its 0215 and the resident is calling me tellling me that they’re done. Thank god. I get back to the call room by 0230 and sleep until my alarm wakes me up at 0630. I head to L & D to see if they’ve given the resident any business last night, which they haven’t. The were just calling him for an epidural, so I hang out, sign the paperwork and head downstairs.
I was asked when I showed up to start my call if I could stay and start a few cases to get the day going, I’d only be there about an hour late. Whatever. Of course I head to the or desk and find out we now have an emergency case that needs to bump something. As I’m the only attending there, I get to pick what gets bumped. The fellow is paged and sets up the room. I see the patient and get the case started. At 0800 they let me leave.
I got 4 hours of uninterrupted “sleep” which really isn’t bad for where I work. I survived with no c-sections (not even they typical 0200 one we get). But sleep on call isn’t really sleep. It doesn’t matter if I’m in house or taking call from home. I could get 10 hours of “sleep” on call and I’d still be better off with five hours not on call in my own bed. The problem with sleeping on call is that I don’t let my body fully relax or go into a truly deep sleep. I’m always waiting for the pager to go off, the phone to ring. And if I actually go to sleep and wake up the first thing I instinctively do is look at the clock and check to make sure the pager is on. I think I slept better when the princess was first home from the hospital and nursing every 3ish hours then I do when on call.
And God forbid I have to do anything the next day. If I’m lucky, I can go home, eat a small breakfast and try and sleep until noon. That’s the key to getting back on schedule - if I sleep past noon, I won’t be able to sleep that night. Of course it could be worse, I could still be doing a week of nights at a time like I did in residency.
And do you know what the worst part is? I wouldn't change a thing.
Sorry if I’m long winded and rambling, I’m running on four hour of call sleep plus an hour of napping on the plane.
