Post Call Days

I am on call today - so you might be wondering why I titled this blog post call day. The reason - post call days are the only thing that gets me through the call these days.

I am SO sick of call. I understand that I will be "on call" for the rest of my life. However, I only have 5 1/2 more months of in house call. In house call, for those who haven't had the joy of experiencing it, means that you come in one morning and go home the next day. You literally spend the night in the hospital taking care of the patients. I thought I had finally out ranked in house call after my second year at Vanderbilt, but they still do it here. Call nights are usually busy, but even the quiet ones are not restful. It is like standing under a guillotine waiting on the blade to fall.

Tonight is not a quiet call night. I am currently waiting on a pair of lungs to show up for transplant. In the meantime, we have 28 patients in the CTICU, 68 pts on the cardiac floor and my own thoracic patients. Unfortunately, I have never even met the cardiac surgeon that I am transplanting with tonight. He normally works at a different hospital and rarely takes call here - until tonight our paths have never crossed. This adds a little extra anxiety to the case because I have no idea how he "does things" so it is learning on your feet.

The one thing that makes tonight bearable is knowing tomorrow is my post call day. Prior to the 80 hour work rule restrictions, that statement didn't mean very much. You worked just as hard your post call day as you did any other day. However, the restrictions have been good for something. It is now federally mandated (so we do it most of the time) that we go home before noon the day after our call day. This may not sound like much to you, but this is a whole 6-10 hours of the day that I normally don't have to act like a normal person.

And boy do I have plans. The list of things that I would like to accomplish tomorrow is incredibly long - it always is. What will actually accomplish often depends on how bad the call night becomes. If I can pull off a couple of hours sleep, I am hoping for a mail run, Target run, oil change and pedicure/brow wax. If I get no sleep, I should go for the oil change, but will probably whittle down to the brow wax and pedicure (girl has to have her priorities).

Here's dreaming of post call days.