'Tis better to be on call at the hospital!!! Well, not quite, but I guess that's thinking positively. Weather.com informs me that it is 25 degrees here, and it feels like 13. I hear the nurses complaining about the bad traffic and slick roads on their drive in for the night shift, and other nurses getting ready to leave are all bundling up for the blustery outdoors weather. Which makes me feel warm and cozy, now that I've changed into my scrubs and am sitting in my lamp-lit call room, the drapes drawn and the bed ready to crawl into!
It's been a busier call day, and I realize the thing I hate is not being busy, but being pulled in multiple directions at once. Returning pages in the midst of trying to write a History and Physical while I present to attendings and try to juggle that with the interns checking out to me! I shouldn't have this problem so much in anesthesia. There I sit, with one patient to focus on!
So it's 9:00 PM, my evening rounds are done on my new patients, I've stamped out a few cross-cover issues, and I'm not sure if I'm up next or my co-intern. It's nice being caught up! A productive use of the next hour would be updating my check-out list and finding a good article about one of my patients.
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Addendum
Yes, that would have been a productive use of the last hour. Instead, I ventured outside, where I found the weather pleasantly brisk until the wind picked up and "bitterly cold" became a more apt description.
I wandered over to the "Page Operator" room in the Women's Health building, which is in a sense the communications center of the hospital. The page operators are always so friendly, and tonight was no exception. There I met Bridgette, Cocoa, and Kelon. They showed me how the software works.
I swung through the Emergency Department to get a sense 0f how busy it was. The busyness of the E.D. has an inverse relationship to my probability of getting sleep. Even though many would consider this bad luck, I was pleased to find a short patient list on the monitors. I scurried out before my presence could remind anyone that, oh yes, there is a teaching service we can admit to!
My last stop was the cafeteria for a cup of hot tea and a scone to carry back to my call room upstairs on the top floor of the hospital. Momentarily, I'll pull off my shoes, dim the lamps, and just sink into that downy feather bed...
6 comments:
A down feather bed?? The next thing will be adjustable mattresses so that each resident on call can enjoy their preferred level of mattress firmness! This hospital keeps sounding nicer and nicer.
I'm glad someone picked up on my joke! It's actually just a regular mattress.
Heh. I was about to comment that I didn't know which I found more amusing-- your description of the military-issue call room beds or the fact that 25 degrees is considered cold in Texas.
That's what in metric-- a few degrees below zero? Still sandal weather in these parts!
25 degrees Fahrenheit equals -7 degrees Celsius. I would guess nearly any native-born Texan would say this is cold (especially with wind-chill), just as any native-born Candian would say 38 degree weather is hot. Wouldn't you say, my dear Canadian counterpart?
And there's no denying it--this hospital has to have some of the nicest call rooms in the country!
Jonathan, I think your Fahrenheit to Celsius conversion is a little off, but I agree that it's cold!
You're right. It should be -4 degrees Celsius. Celsius = (Fahrenheit - 32) * 5 / 9
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