#1: At first I was afraid...
As Gloria Gayner (and later Cake) sang, "at first I was afraid; I was petrified." Yet I survived my first night of overnight call! 30 hours in the hospital and I'm still alive (and more importantly so are my patients.) The transition from being a medical student to being an intern as I experienced last night was abrupt and HUGE! As a medical student I would rarely get paged by anyone during the day and last night I got "hammer paged," which means that I got a page on my beeper and just as I took my pager out to look at it another page (or two) would arrive. Even more importantly, as an intern I am now making medical decisions and implementing them in practice (prescribing medications, changing intravenous fluids, and discharging patients from the hospital) where as a medical student I never made any real decisions. It's amazing that just 2 months ago I had no "power" in the hospital (the common phrase I heard was "we need a MD to do that, not a medical student") and now all of a sudden it seems I had some magical transition in judgement to be able to make medical decisions.
There is a really humorous nurse on the fifth floor of the hospital who has been around for a while and is very good at her job as a floor nurse. She asked me to evaluate her patient, who was writhing with atypical chest pain and I decided (with the advice of my chief resident) to double the patient's pain medication because we thought he was too stoic to ask for the appropriate pain medication. The nurse said, in a somewhat angry tone, "Dr. Maturin, I totally DO NOT AGREE with that decision because that patient is too stubborn to use his pain button and he is just going to continue to be in pain." I was a little intimidated by this women, and I agreed in principle as well, and therefore I adjusted the pain medication further... It worked. Wow.
Currently Reading: Surgery On Call.
Currently Watching: I was too tired today to make it past 2 minutes of channel flipping before I fell asleep.
Next blog: Expected the evening of Saturday July 1st.
There is a really humorous nurse on the fifth floor of the hospital who has been around for a while and is very good at her job as a floor nurse. She asked me to evaluate her patient, who was writhing with atypical chest pain and I decided (with the advice of my chief resident) to double the patient's pain medication because we thought he was too stoic to ask for the appropriate pain medication. The nurse said, in a somewhat angry tone, "Dr. Maturin, I totally DO NOT AGREE with that decision because that patient is too stubborn to use his pain button and he is just going to continue to be in pain." I was a little intimidated by this women, and I agreed in principle as well, and therefore I adjusted the pain medication further... It worked. Wow.
Currently Reading: Surgery On Call.
Currently Watching: I was too tired today to make it past 2 minutes of channel flipping before I fell asleep.
Next blog: Expected the evening of Saturday July 1st.
posted by Stephen Maturin @ 6/26/2006 05:01:00 PM
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