And they make the most obnoxious noise, even if you select the most pleasing of ring tones.
July 1, my DrH transitioned from Internal Medicine resident to Nephrology fellow. We are truly in the home stretch! Just 3 years left.
He's traded the pesky overnight calls every 3 nights at the hospital to home calls once a week! If you're remotely involved/know someone who is in medicine, whether a med student, resident, fellow, or attending, you know how hard those overnight calls can be! And, if you're like me, and you're married to that person, you know how lonely it gets being all by yourself multiple nights a week.
So, DrH has made the switch from overnight call to home call. Sounds delightful, right? MUCH better, right?
Wrong.
The crux of the problem is that pesky pager. You're just drifting off to sleep when you here a "BEEP BEEP BEEP", which jolts you! Every ring tone on those pagers sounds like someone is dying OR there is a fire/emergency in the house. There is no way around it. Then DrH stumbles for it and his phone, wanders into another room, and you are just hoping the patient he was paged about isn't so sick he needs to go into the hospital.
This was last night... between this random cold I have and the persistent coughing and the BEEP BEEP BEEP, I don't think either of us settled down until after midnight.
I know from my DrH's perspective, home call is better than being stuck at the hospital all night, until, that is, you have to go to the hospital in the middle of the night. It's a gamble, but if you're mostly woken up to pages where surgery was trying to get a hold of hematology, not nephrology (true story - my husband couldn't figure out why the surgeon assumed DrH should know who this patient was!), then it's comforting to know you just crawl back into bed and wait for the next page.
From the Mrs. Doctor perspective.......................... sigh................................. home call stinks. Getting woken up randomly throughout the night is one thing. But if my DrH needs to leave at 1:00AM to see a patient, I can't go back to sleep. I'm too worried about him getting there and back safely in the middle of the night. And then the selfish reason - Overnight call in residency meant a night off for me. No dinner to cook (bowl of cereal!!). I can watch whatever I want. Or, shoot! I can pin to Pinterest all night!
Pagers..... ugh.
And now, because it's slightly on topic, it made me chuckle, and I hear it is the most accurate of the doctor shows:
No comments:
Post a Comment