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.