A Hard Days Night

It is 9 pm on my post call day, and I am sitting here with the familiar feeling that somehow I lost a day. It is now Thursday when it seemed like just a moment ago it was Wednesday morning and I was going to work. For those who have experienced a hard call night, they can relate to driving home the next day feeling a little unfocused, or not really caring about anything but just getting to your call room in hopes your pager won't go off too soon, or taking about 2 minutes to write a sentence in your note the next day because your mind won't focus. I hate call. Everyone hates call. It is not humane and doesn't make sense from a patient care standpoint or in simple terms of what we should do to our bodies. Yet, it persists and will likely continue. The theory is that if a resident is in the hospital all the time they can see the progression of the disease, and therefore learn more. What isn't explicitly stated is that after about 18 hours for me personally, I no longer care about the progresson of the disease. I am on autopilot trying to do my work and not harm anyone in the process. All I care about is sleep. However, I still have 12 more hours of work to do, and in those 12 hours, I am not my sharpest, do not care about having discussions to get a complete history, and may not necessarily make mistakes...but don't put as much effort into doing as thorough of a workup as I might otherwise. Plus it just sucks! You go home, and I am usually starving and smell. I have an aversion to going to sleep directly because I worry about MRSA and C.diff sheets, so usually take a shower. Then if I am very lucky, hit the bed by 1:30 or 2:00 the next day. Let me clarify, the day before my day would start at 5:30 or 6:00 am, and I will have been at the hospital sometimes (like last night) without a moments rest until I head home. Then I usually wake up around 5 ish, and then am in this sort-of daze. Kind of like how you feel after partying too hard the night before. I work out (because I have too, not out of desire), eat, then try to go to bed around 10:30. That is what works for me. Others try to stay up and then crash early and sleep hard. There is no good system. Of course there are good call days, and bad call days. The good days are not good in that you "learned a lot" The good days are good because you didn't admit many patients or the patients you were following weren't too sick so you didn't get called much. The good days are when you can sleep and pretend you are a normal person. The bad days such as I had last night, are actually the times when you are admitting really sick patients. I put in 7 central lines and 2 intubations last night. It was a terrible night.