#2: Hammer paging

I've never experienced what it was like to be "hammer paged," which happened Friday night on call. Being hammer paged was when my pager went off and before I could even dial the number to return the page three new pages came through. Since I'm still new at taking call I didn't realize that some pages and questions could wait and so I got mentally bogged down by trying to treat all issues equally. However, I quickly learned that only about 5-10% of pages were really worth addressing right away. Like the page where I got called to evaluate a pretty sick patient that that was having trouble breathing after he had a procedure earlier in the day where needles were stuck in his chest. I was worried that he might have a hole in the lining around his lung that could cause air to be trapped in between his chest wall and his lung, and so after getting the appropriate tests we transferred him to an area of the hospital where he could be monitored more intensely. After all my worrying he turned out to be OK, so I was pretty relieved.

I'm still getting used to using the computer physician order entry program that we use at our hospital. Firstly, it's pretty slow and whenever I have to order a new thing, it takes me a while to find the area in the program to enter it. Yesterday I made a pretty funny mistake though. I was trying to order a suppository for a patient to help him move his bowels over the night. When I put in the order for the medication, the program kept trying to enter in the medication to be given every day. I couldn't figure out how to only give him the suppository ONCE, and the only way I could figure out how to do it was to order the item "stat." (Stat is typically reserved for emergency or high priority actions.) You can imagine the smack that I got from the nursing staff: "Quick! Get Mr. L some Dulcolax STAT!" I have since figured out the proper way to order this type of medication.


Patients I covered last call night: 48
Currently watching: The Devil Wears Prada (I went out with my wife and two of her girlfriends to watch it!)
Currently reading: Nothing, but planning to start studying surgery textbooks this week.
Next blog: Expected Thursday, July 6th, after my third night of call.