The night shift

The night shift. There's no other students. There's only one junior resident, one senior and one staff. I did 8pm-8am last night.

I saw a lady who went into labour at 24 weeks in her pregnancy. The baby was so tiny, 700g. The parents were pretty brave considering; they were taking everything with a strong face, even though I'm sure they were terrified. I mean, their newborn baby was so premature. It came out fighting, waving its arms and kicking its feet, it even tried to take a few breaths. The pediatricians took the baby straight into the resuscitation room to intubate it and get it to the NICU (neonatal intensive care unit). It had no 'meat' on it, no baby fat. I talked to the resident in pediatrics after, the baby was doing fine but these kids usually do okay for the first day and deteriorate after day 1.

I saw another baby born at 24 weeks during my last rotation. The mum had the baby come out, basically fall out, when she went to the bathroom. The baby was so hypothermic, temp was 31 degrees (premature babies under 2100g can't keep the body temperature up on their own). The baby passed away a week later.

Last night, around 2h45, I had a consult in the emergency room for a perimenopausal lady who had such a heavy period because of a fibroid that was basically making her bleed to death. She had passed out because she had lost so much blood. The messed up thing is that she came to the hospital around 16hoo. Our service only found out about her at 2h45!! She needed a blood transfusion because of the bleeding. It's not like we were so busy we couldn't have seen her earlier, we only found out about her at two in the morning. So here was the lady, basically bleeding to death in the hospital. She was still very pleasant with me, a real angel. People amaze me at how they're in such terrible situations sometimes and yet they still have it in them to be nice and polite. It's quite charming. There's also people out there who are monsters all the time, even when they aren't sick.

I helped repair a woman's vagina after it tore, very minimally, last night. The staff literally guided my hand through the whole thing, but it was still cool to stitch someone up. For the same lady, during her delivery, I applied "fundal pressure." This basically means that I stand beside the lady, put my hands on her belly and push down while she's pushing to help pop the baby out.

There's construction outside of my apartment right now. Oh! Oh! Guess what! There's construction INSIDE my apartment too! Honestly, I don't know how people work nights. Going to bed when the sun is up and waking up when it's setting is awful. Yeah, I know it's my first day, but I really don't think I could ever get used to this. Luckily, there isn't really an area of medicine where work is only during the night.

I also had to assess a lady with stage 4 ovarian cancer who was terminal, last night. She couldn't talk anymore, it sounded like she had bad pneumonia.

It's not all fun and games, but I'm still having a great time.