Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Just another day

Here is a typical day in my life as a surgery intern on call:
Get to the hospital by 5 or 6am (sometimes 4am depending on the service)
Round on all of our patients with residents/fellows/med students- for us right now we have 23 patients, most of whom are critically ill so this takes a couple of hours
Meet with attending to round again
Write orders on all patients, schedule tests and procedures, contact consultants and discuss plans
Go to OR (this isn't happening much yet for me, but it will on other rotations)
Inhale food
See patients, follow up on tests, write more orders
Go back to OR
Admit new patients to hospital
Meet with intern from every other surgical service when they go home to get my "to-do list" from them on their patients
Answer unending pages (literally 100-200/night) from trivial questions to emergencies
Do post-op checks on everyone's patients
Admit new patients
Put out fires/crises
Eat
See more new patients
Try and lay down for a bit- get interrupted by a page every 5-15 minutes
Get up and talk with every other intern when they show up in the morning to tell them what I did with their patients overnight
Go see all of my patients again
Round with other residents/fellows on my team
Go to morbidity and mortality conference and resident education hours
Round with our attending
Write orders, call consultants, ensure tests and procedures are still happening
Take sutures out of patients, pull drains and tubes
Go home after 32 nearly non-stop hours
Go for a long bike ride to unwind- still answering pages while biking down the road
Continue to get pages every hour for the rest of the day
Go to sleep early to start it all over again the next day

It's been pretty wild, but I love what I am doing!

1 comment:

~Sherry said...

Wow! You have some exciting days Angie. Most other jobs seem so boring compared to yours. Keep up the good work! I am inspired!