DrH was on call this weekend. We went to bed Sunday night at 10:00 and by 10:30 he had been paged. An elderly person with a head bleed that the family didn't want intervention for. My husband is a surgeon, you don't page him unless you want intervention. But either the ER doc or the family needed reassurance that the head bleed was serious enough and not just a tiny bump. I am just guessing based on what I heard. But I know he came home, I think he came home. I could swear that when I got up at 3:00 am to get the baby I saw him in our bed. By the time I went to the baby's room and came back he was gone! It was magic, or my mind was playing games with me.
I know it was probably the latter. But I really thought I saw him. Turns out when I did finally see him (for real this time) a few hours later he had another call that disrupted his sleep, but not mine.
Here are some things about call:
House call: this is where the resident stays in the hospital during his entire call shift. He sleeps in the call room if there aren't enough calls to keep him up all night.
Post call: usually for docs who take house call there is a post call "holiday". This is where the doc, after working his call, reports to the incoming doc and then goes home to sleep until the next day. I was so looking forward to post call. I could schedule all my appointments for late in the afternoon on his post call days and we would get to spend late afternoons/evenings together. It wasn't meant to be.
Home call: this is where the resident stays home and comes in if he gets paged. Some days/nights you score and not much is going on at the hospital and you get to sleep. Other nights are brutal and the resident spends all night at the hospital and then gets to work that next day too.
Programs either have one or the other. Unless you live more than 20 minutes form the hospital then you must sleep at the hospital but you don't get post call time off.
So my poor DrH is running on about 2 hours of sleep but luckily has a pretty light caseload today. I hope he finds time to take a nap, but he should probably consider taking it at the hospital because this house is going to be hopping today - it's finish all the little projects day!
Hope your weekend was great!
The great thing about being an attending-all call is home call. Of course that doesn't mean he is really "here"all the time. Thank God for computers and the Internet! It's rather incredible the way he can log in from home to review studies.
ReplyDeleteIt's that darn 20 minute rule that really gets me into trouble. But anything is better than in-hospital call.