Signout

So the taskmaster, Princess Sophia, demands I post again.

Not much to say, though. The nurses didn't page me at all after 3AM, so I actually got some sleep last night (a whole 1.5 hours), which is why I'm still awake.

We are supposed to do our work post-call and then sign out to the team on call for the day. The great thing about signing out is all the calls for tylenol, constipation, or diarrhea go to someone else. You just need to make it to signout and the pages stop. It's like a race - answer the pages as fast as you possibly can while desparately searching around the hospital for th e call team.

I lost the race today. At about 11AM I was done my work and ready to sign out. Unfortunately at 11 the nurses are also up and running and finding all the things you forgot to take care of. I didn't sign out until 1:15 this afternoon.

My New Favorite Nurse:

Second night of call last night with a new resident. She has an interesting style - she told me early in the afternoon that I was maxing out at 5 admissions but would only tell me about two. I guess she thought she was doing me a favor but it sucked knowing I was going to get hit with three more patients and have no information to work with.

No interesting cases to report, although I did get a page at 3am for a guy whose arm suddendly exploded with fluid. He was understandably distressed, but it looked pretty cool. I'm bettin' he had a clot in his arm but since I was only cross covering I never found out the results of the test I ordered.

And let me tell you about my new favorite nurse - let's call him Murse Melvin. Melvin speaks with a very strong lisp such that when you talk to him on the phone you don't have the slightest idea what he is saying. He would call and I would hear my patient is a pain give me IV Lomotil when he was trying to tell me that his patient had pain and needed Ibuprofen. The result - I had to go see his patients every single time he called to figure out what they needed. But that's not even his best quality. Melvin likes to keep you up to date with his patients. He wants you to know everything. Therefore, he feels it is necessary to page the doctor (me unfortunately) at 2:30 and 4:30 in the morning to tell you that his patients vital signs are now normal.

You are supposed to page the doctor if there is something important to be done. What am I supposed to do with normal vitals? I suppose I could have gone and smacked his patients around to change that but I am not sure that would be appropriate. Maybe Melvin wanted a medal for being able to use the automated blood pressure cuff well. I got less than a 1/2 hour sleep last night because of crap like that.

On the bright side, as of 1:30 this afternoon, I am off until Monday morning.

Done Day 3

A few annoyances to report:

1) Why does infectious disease get to take off from 1-5 on Sundays when I can't? And why do I have to wait for them to return to give my patient an antibiotic?

2) Why do the social workers get to go home at 3 because they feel like it, stranding my patient in the hospital overnight?

3) For those of you that wanted narcotics, you can forget it. I don't have a DEA number, and unless I pay $600, I will have to ask my bosses to write outpatient prescriptions for the next three years.

Otherwise, things are going well.

Fun with schedules

So I start on the floor on Sunday, and we finally got the schedule on Wednesday. Yeah, that's late, if you're wondering - apparently they were having "computer difficulties".

So anyway, the schedule is a series of strange letter abbreviations, like RL1, FD2, and XQDSAKVJN1. I thought that my code meant that I was doing heme-onc, liquids (that means treating leukemia, lymphoma, etc.). When people asked what I was doing for the first six weeks, I said "liquid tumors" and everyone said "oh... that's too bad".

Well anyway, I looked at my schedule again tonight and I noticed next to my RL1 it said IntS. So now I think its possible I am doing solid tumors (organ cancers).

So to sum up, I start on Sunday, I am doing Oncology, and I have no idea which service I'm on. Let the games begin.