My first night on call

Friday. Get to the hospital at 7am. I work on my patients. I manage to get follow-up for one of my patient's ten separate problems, this managed to take most of my time. My other patient's parents find out they get to go home out on pass if the patient is stable the next morning.

By the evening, I almost miss getting supper at the cafeteria, but thankfully my senior resident tells me to stop what I'm doing (paperwork) and go get my dinner. I make it just in time, and I order the pork and vegetables with rice and string beans. By far, the worst meal I have had in a long time. I should have taken salt and pepper. I wolf it down and rush back to the ward to get back to work. By the evening, the staff is still at the hospital. I find out my responsibility for the evening is to admit patients to the ward, nothing else. In the meantime, the staff and I go to assess a patient who hasn't urinated since 10am (very abnormal for a baby, it means she's dehydrated) and a patient who should have been going home that night, but we had to keep for the night because we only got to him around 12:30 because of the kid with the dehydration.

I write up some notes in the patients' charts and finish that by 1:00. For the next two hours I work on discharge paperwork on two patients I discharged this week. By 2:30, I'm done that and I'm told that if I have nothing to do that I should go to sleep. I head to the on-call rooms and find out that the combination that I have doesn't work. I get the right one from security and enter the room. It's a small room with a hospital bed. It's roasting in there, and there's no fan or A/C. I fall asleep around 3:30 but I wake up at 4:00. I check my pager, still no pages, and we stop admitting patients at 4:00. So, I haven't admitted anyone all night. I fall back asleep and wake up at 6:45 to go see what's up. I get out of the hospital at 9:00, feeling like I didn't really get a chance to see what call was like, but what can I do, it just worked out that way for me. I'm on call again Tuesday, so I'll update again then, and I'll probably have a story.