Ups and Downs

So, after bragging what a great life I have, I got slammed in the face. Friday I went to work at my usual 7:00 a.m.--watched a couple autopsies performed, starting chatting with a dude on toxicology, got paged. I was on "jeapordy call," a privilege 1st years have of picking up shifts when someone calls in sick. I ended up going in to the ED and working until 12:00. Then I had to get up at 3:30 to round on all of the 5 pages of neurosurgery patients before the attending got there at 6:00, then spent the day discharging patients from the neurosurgery list (the doctor didn't round on more than a couple of HIS pts, left the decision up to me if the rest were ready to go home. Me, a first year, no experience in neurosurgery, deciding when people whose brain/spinal cord were just operated on could go home. Scary). The rest of the day and night was filled with more consults like depressed skull fractures in kids, newly found spinal tumors, head bleeds, etc. I got to sleep at about 2:30 a.m. only to get awakened 15 minutes later for another consult--T7-T11 Fx with fragments in the canal. Didn't get any more sleep that night. Unlike others, I had every excuse to NOT go to church, except that I had to teach the lesson in Elder's Quorum. So, that was basically a 52 hour shift with a 4 hour break (11:30 p.m. to 3:30 a.m.) and 20 minutes of sleep. The problem is that most people who hear this story don't have any sympathy for me when they hear I was getting about $1400 for Saturday's woes and long hours.

In other news, the weekend passed, I went to work for about an hour Monday morning, then I went to the zoo with the kids for a couple hours, then back in to work. Yesterday, grand rounds day, we had "EMS day," where we spent the time using "jaws of life" to rip the doors and roofs off a couple cars. Then we used the fire hoses to put out a couple mini-fires, then transferred patients from an ambulance to a helicopter with its rotors spinning (preparation for Life Flight next year), and a couple such things. Then the Toledo SWAT team came out and showed off their stuff and let us shoot a few of their guns--the rubber bullets, gas balls, foam bullets, etc.

Don't worry, it's not always this glorious. I have OB next, then trauma for 2 months. Trauma is one of those you-won't-get-any-sleep-at-all and definitely pushing 80+ hours a week kind of rotations. The dude on trauma the other night had at least 15 pts come in over night, often 3 or 4 at a time.