#31 / #32 / #33 / #34 / #35: Neuroslavery

Yes, yes. I know it's a big cop-out to bundle up 5 nights of call action into one blog post. It was interesting to hear everyone's perspective on how days in the hospital and office life have "themes."

Most recently I started on a new service: Neurosurgery. I call it Neuroslavery because I've never been treated so much like a gopher by senior residents on any other service. The neurosurgery program at my hospital is pretty small - there is only one resident in neurosurgery per year of training - and they all work on the same service together all year round. The intern, or member of the team with the least amount of training (ie. me), is NOT in the neurosurgery program. Since all of these people work all year round together, I don't feel like part of the team since they were such a close-knit group. Furthermore, I think they think of me as free labor. They expect me to do all of the dirty work like seeing all the patients, writing daily notes, writing orders on all of the patients. Then, they don't look at any of the studies that we order during the day - they expect me to look up and know all of the results (which I do) but when I discuss the results on rounds half the time they have forgotten what the results are by the next morning and they ask again. Furthermore, they ask me to consult other services to ask some of the most ridiculous questions I've ever heard. For example, the other day a woman was coughing (no fever) and we started her on cough drops and sent a test that ruled out strep throat in the woman. Yet still, my senior resident asked me to consult the Internal Medicine service to ask them about the best management of sore throat and coughing. I felt like the biggest jerk paging the Internal Medicine people and asking for their help. Finally, there is a nurse practitioner in the neurosurgery clinic who calls all day long and asks me to go to clinic to write pre-operative notes. This is totally ridiculous because she was hired by the clinic in order to do the very job that she asks me to do, yet somehow they want me to hike across the hospital (5 minutes) in order to interview the patient (10 minutes) and fill out a pre-op sheet (5 minutes) and then walk back to the wards (5 minutes.) In total, it's 25 minutes of my time in order to save the nurse 5 minutes of her time.

No, I'm not bitter about the month at all...

The only saving grace about the rotation is that call nights aren't as difficult. I cover Ear, Nose, and Throat patients, Plastic Surgery patients, and Thoracic Surgery patients. The Thoracic Surgery patients can get very sick - like the other night I was on call a guy was bleeding into his lung after surgery - but overall I've gotten more sleep and had less admission work-ups at 3 AM than on my first few rotations...

Last call nights/amount of sleep
Wednesday November 1st (3 hrs)
Saturday November 4th (30 min)
Thursday November 9th (3 hrs)
Monday November 13th (4 hrs)
Friday November 17th (1.5 hrs)
Currently reading: Just got my first Journal of American College of Surgeons.
Currently watching: HBO's Rome. Seems like a pretty cool series so far.
Next call night: Tuesday November 21st.