Sunday, August 06, 2006

The First

Everyone dreads there first night on call and I 'm certainly not cool enough to pretend that I wasn't scared. For those not in the know, call means that you start work in the morning, stay overnight in the hospital and round again in the morning. It's about a thirty hour shift. The scary thing about being on call is that most of the people who know what the hell there doing leave around six, and then it's all you. The attendings make a big deal about the fact that you can call them at home so technically were not really alone. But if you believe that then I'll order you a psych consult.
Lay people also fool themselves into thinking " Hey, your doctors. What's the problem" Seriously though, we graduate as med students on a Friday and start work on a Monday. There's no great infusion of knowledge over that weekend, so one day we can't order an asprin without a co-signer and the next day were left overnight with critical patients. I highly advise you never to enter a teaching hospital in June or July. The monkeys are running the asylum. But I digress.

So I'm on call in the ICU and I have known my patients for about four hours. Just long enough for me to figure out there names and ventilator settings but not long enough to get used to the incessant beeping of alarms that is the background music in any ICU. My resident, whose job it is to orient me and make sure I don't accidentely kill any one, has clinic and will be gone for the afternoon. Ummm, I'm not really sure this a good idea. And sure enough out comes the nurse from Bed 8 " Mr Alberto has a pulse of 180, blood pressure is 70 over 40 and he's sating (O2 saturation) at 73%. What do you want to do?" What do I want to do: RUN. I don't know what the fuck to do, are you kidding me. I've never felt that inadequate in my life. I walk in the room and sure enough, things are as bad as the nurse says they are. "Page the resident" I order with some semblence of authority in my voice. Vague recollections of orientation are comming back to me, but I can only remember the drugs we give when the heart stops or slows. Not exactly the case I'm facing now. And then I remember that I can give a beta-blocker, a wonderous drug that slows the heart rate and is generally not all that dangerous. So I push my drug waiting for it to fix things and nothing is happening. My patient still has the heart rate of a coked-up hummingbird. My resident calls back and as calmly as I can fake I explain that things have promptly gone to hell upstairs. "Well did you give Metoprolol" he says. "Of course I did" I answer, like how dare he think I don't know what I'm doing. "And it didn't work" Umm, no. "I think you should come up here" Now he's pissed. That whole discussion of how we can call for help when we need it-total bullshit.

My resident heads back to the ICU, walks in and says "This isn't good". Yeah, I'm pretty sure I had already made that determination. Can we move on to the 'How to fix it' portion of the conversation. Out comes a whole arsonal of drugs that I clearly have no idea how to use. We push dig, we give dilt, nothing works. Then the Cardiology team comes wandering in and announces to the world that we need to break this rhythm. I'm going to file that under the "Duh" category. We tell them what we've tried and that nothing has worked and they offer a simulataneously exciting and terrifying option:Cardioversion. Cardioversion is shocking the heart and hoping that when it restarts it decides to beat like its supposed to. It freaks us out because in rare instances you can shock it and it doesn't restart. As the new intern I get to be the one who cardioverts. "Charging 100. Charged. Clear" Blam 100 joules hits the guy and he jumps of the bed. We all stare at the moniter and see the most wonderous sight. Normal sinus rhythm at a rate of 83 beats per minute.
This is that part in the movie where we all walk away and congratulate ourselves for a job well done, but I'm an call. There is no walking away. I'm going to be taking care of this man all night long, by myself, and he could probably do this again and again and again. And next time my resident will be gone and Cardiology won't be in house. I started my call night scared. And that's where I stayed all night long. White knuckling it until the cavelry arrived the next morning. In spite of how hard I can try I will never be able to properly articulate what momments like these do to the soul. Its easy to say well everything worked out, and it did. But looking back I can laugh and joke, but that night was so terrifying. Our only goal is to keep the patients alive until the morning, and you can't fail at that. You can't fail as a doctor. This year is going to be so painful, because I will fail, and people will die. And I will never forget that feeling of just wanting to run and knowing that I couldn't. I cried the entire way home from the hospital.
I'm on call again in three days.

5 comments:

Gregory House, PA-C said...

Call scares the crap out of me. Good thing it's not for another....6years. (hopefully)

Irishdoc said...

Call does get better after awhile but if your on a service where people regularly die, your always on your toes

Panda Bear said...

Beautiful. You capture the first night of call exactly...and the second and the third and the fourth...etc.

I'm only now starting to get the hang of things but I still ahve a little trouble intubating. Once I get thatdown I think I'm going to be able to relax a little.

natoh said...

Reading other med student/doctor blogs really comforts me. Not in a "it'll all be fine" kinda way... more like a "everyone one else feels like killing themselves too, you don't have a mental illness" type of way...

I don't undertstand how medicine is seen as so glamerous. It's hard , hot, smelly work..

Anonymous said...

I want to echo what nat said down below. It is comforting to read people's real life perspectives of medicine and get a sense of reality to remind us of what we are really getting ourselves into. I was having this discussion today with someone and he was saying he wasn't a fan of blogs because he doesn't know how much he can trust whether they are telling the truth or not and thought they were too much opinion. But I'd argue that that would be the case if it were only one or two people who felt that way but everywhere I look I see people saying the same thing. Just put different names and different faces to the story and the basic elements are the same. I feel comfort knowing the reality that's ahead rather then being in for a shock when it comes around.

Your experiences sound scary and I hope things get better. I can only feel empathy for what you are going through. I wish I could say more but as I haven't been there I can only offer you support and hope things get better with time.