#17: The Program Director's service is easy

This is a retrospective post from Sunday night's call. My actual last call was Thursday night, which means that this weekend is my GOLDEN WEEKEND! Look for a post tomorrow about Thursday night's call, which was pretty uneventful.

Sunday was notable for one of my patients coding. It was a patient I was cross-covering, and I heard the "Code Blue Transplant Floor" and I was like "Holy crap! That's one of my patients!" I ran up to the floor and compressions were just started. Luckily, the transplant attending was on the floor and therefore I was the fouth or fifth physician to arrive so there was a very fast response. We shocked and intubated and the patient regained a rhythm and then got transferred to the Surgical ICU. Score one for advance cardiac life support - so far I've been to three codes and two of the patients regained a rhythm afterwards, which I think is probably above normal percentages. On Sunday I tired to go to sleep at around 1 AM and finding out that there was a new patient who all of a sudden just showed up on the floor transferred from another hospital without any information about why they were being transferred. Furthermore, the patient was Spanish-speaking only and even though I speak a little Spanish there is no way that I could figure out anything more complicated than whether or not a patient has pain in their abdomen or if they have flatus or bowel movements and therefore I had to call a Spanish Interpreter at 1 AM. According to law, patients being transferred should come with a discharge summary but this one didn't and therefore their transferring hospital COULD be fined $10,000 but I guess that road is never pursued.

I started on a new service which is GI Surgery (my second month since I also did GI Surgery in July.) However, this new service has only one attending, who happens to be the Program Director. So far the service has been pretty easy, but that's because the Program Director was on vacation this past week. His service is typically very busy and next weeks looks to be pretty tough!

Last call night Sunday, September 3rd.
Amount of sleep last call night: 1 hour.
Currently reading: The News and Observer Weekend Paper!
Currently watching: He Got Game. Denzel and Spike Lee are awesome. Ray Allen is too, but he's not the best actor.
Next call night: Thursday, September 7th