#41: Hired gun

Vacation was very needed. I got back from a week off in which I spent some time doing a whole lot of nothing, visiting a nearby college town so my wife could interview for residencies, and visiting my parents in Florida. It was tough to go back to work after all of that but I had no choice.

I started the week back at work as a "hired gun". I had previously been scheduled to be on trauma but the Surgical Oncology service was short a senior resident and they asked me to help out the team as an extra body. The first day I was on the service our chief resident was post-call so he went home early and the other intern on the team decided that since I was now on the team that she could leave early as well - even though I didn't really know the patients all that well. That left me as the only resident to round on all the patients in the evening. That was all fine by me, but even though I had switched to another service I was still covering the evening call pool of the previous service, so three services signed out their patients to me in the evening while I was trying to round. To make matters worse, I had to do a procedure on one of my new service's patients by midnight or the guy wouldn't be able to get any nutrition via his central line. So I felt slightly rushed, but the evening turned out to be tolerable in the end - even though I was waking up every hour or so to go check on a patient with low urine output who was in the pediatric intensive care unit (across the hospital from the call room!)

In real time, I have four days off now over the holidays, but I have two more call nights to chronicle in the next two days so look out for some new posts!

Last call night: Monday December 18th.
Amount of sleep: 2.5 hours (in spurts.)
Currently reading: Rolling Stone's Year in Review magazine.
Currently watching: Sound of Music in HD. It is such an awesome movie.
Currently listenintg to: Sufjan Stevens.
Next call night: Sunday December 24th.