Waiting and Watching: I’m on-call today, and I’m sitting here working on some verbatims, some paperwork and getting caught up on a little email. Yet, I can’t stop looking at the pager. Watching it. Just waiting…waiting for it to beep. I actually like the tone of the alert - it’s not an annoying pager noise. But still. It makes it hard to really get into a project, or really get any sleep. Speaking of sleep…
Sleeping in Clothes: I learned today on the train that my fellow CPE-ers actually take clothes off, bring pajamas and get COMFY in the on-call room. My first night, I didn’t have a chance to sleep, but I did get 30min or so rest, just laying there in my clothes. However, last week, when I didn’t have any pages from 11.30pm-6.30am, I still felt nervous about the pager going off, so I just slept in my clothes. I loosened my tie, but kept everything on, including my name badge, and my shoes. Yes, my shoes. I slept for 7 hours with my shoes on. They really laughed at that one. I’m just nervous I’ll be late getting down to the ER or something. Anyway, tonight I am going to try something new: I’ll take my clothes off.
Choosing Food: When you’re on-call, you need to be ready for any situation. So, when I walk into the hospital cafeteria (which is actually pretty good), I can’t just get any food item. I find myself thinking, “Okay, what can I eat fast?” or “Could I put the top back on that and save it for later?” Luckily, I haven’t been paged during dinner yet, but…you never know.
UPDATE: I’ve decided I am not going to blog about being on-call before I’m on-call ever again. Today I sat down for lunch around 12.15pm, opened my Diet Coke, and got paged 30 seconds later. At 1.20pm, I sat down to eat lunch again, and was paged as soon as I took one bite of my sandwich. At 6.30pm, I went for dinner, got my tuna melt, fries and Diet Coke, and had almost put my tray down, when I got paged. I called back and they said it wasn’t urgent. I said I’d be there after I ate dinner. I had just picked my tray back up to sit down and I was paged again. This time it was urgent, so I scarfed down half my tuna melt, put the food in a to-go box, and went to visit the patient.
So, I think I jinxed myself. Now I’m afraid to take my clothes off tonight…
UPDATE #2: I think I may have jinxed myself again. I was just doing rounds on the ICUs and ER and when I walked down into the ER, I was talking with the Patient Rep, and I said, “Wow, it’s been a pretty quiet night down here, hasn’t it?” It is sacrilege to use the “q” word in hospitals - you just don’t do it. So now I’m afraid that my pager will start going off non-stop. But I haven’t had any Code 40s come into the ER yet tonight. But, you know what they say…the night is still young.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
I did CPE at Northside in Atlanta, and I, too, slept with my clothes on. There’s no shame in that. Stay vigilant! Jesus and code blues both come like a thief in the night!
I don’t have the same kind of on-call, but as a Clinical Applications Analyst for a multi-hospital system, I pull a week of on call duty every 6 weeks. For seven straight days, 24 hours a day, I too have the pager to deal with. A lot of what I do I can do at home, so there is nothing like being in my bed, nice and comfy and hearing the beep beep beep of the pager at 3:00 in the morning and having to fix a patient critical system at one or all of the hospitals. And we do this 24 hours a day and still have all of our regular 8-5 duties to attend to. Fun stuff! I feel for ya!
I hope you have a restful night. On the other hand, I have been heard to say that there are no bad nights on call - just good nights and good learning experiences. And this from someone who was feared by medical residents for about a two year period: if I was on, it wouldn’t be a quite night.
On the other hand, you need to unwind some. Yes, you might be 30 seconds later arriving. You’ll probably also be 30 seconds more awake and more collected. Take the shoes off!
Off-topic, but the reference to Moleskine was funny: http://gilest.org/2006/04/gtd-prayer.html
hey adam,
I’m not going to say how my on-call is currently going for fear of…well…you know. Just wanted to second your thoughts on both not talking about one’s on-call if things are going well (a la not talking about a no-hitter when you’re in the dugout) as well as not being able to focus on something b/c the on-call pager rules your life.
if all goes well, I will see you tomorrow morning.