and so its over and done with! i survived! :D first day of work, first call ever, 1st discharge, 1st med prescribed..a whole lot of firsts over just 2 days. The first medicine I prescribed (on my own) was lactulose btw!
The day work was very manageable, my HO (becoming MO) and MO's were very nice and since I had shadowed the team for a day, was familiar with how it worked. Saw a couple of patients with the HO - mainly scribing work and inking up meds on their orders. Finished up the changes pretty quickly and then had a mini tut from HO on what to do for hyperglycemia, hypoglycemia etc etc. Was very thankful for that as felt somewhat better prepared just having that paper with everything written down! :p Had to go source for my own scrubs (thanks to a very disappointing orientation session in the morning - we had no name tag/stamp nothing, just the computer userid!) So basically I was walking around, feeling really like a student intern but to the outside world, I was a Dr now!
And then the clock struck 5, I was all geared up in sports shoes, scrubs and just waited..for the calls to come. The absence of any felt weird initially but boy, come 5.30pm the phone was ringing non-stop!! First was a bunch of passives - hyper and hypoglycemia and fever spikes. felt the compulsive need to read through the entire case notes before I did anything for the patients so was taking a fair bit of time for each case. and soon enough, the new cases started coming in - like 5 one after the other! By this time (ard 6+) all I was doing was writing everything down faithfully and updating my MO promptly after every new case came in. It was highly frustrating that I was taking 30 -45 mins per long case but it cldnt be helped as tracing up old notes and checking their meds took a long time (esp cos I really wanted to be sure of the meds). So was just working my way through wd 63, attending to passives in between, trying to prioritise everything..the next time I saw my watch was 9+ and I still had a handful of new cases to see. Thank god for my MO who was handling the other ward! And just walking along the ward was eventful, for i was literally grabbed by nurses wanting all sorts of orders/meds/plugs etc etc! And each request presented a decision-making demand in terms of whether it was alright to prescribe such & such or write a restrain order etc etc..One thing was sure though, I was definitely sick of the phone ringing! worse, had my personal line beeping non-stop too as the number had been given out wrongly so was trying to update evryone of work number too. It was almost traumatising having 2 phones ringing at the same time, with each nurse trying to make me attend to her first and me having to decide mentally how high on the to-do list each request belonged!
Anyway the night pretty much slipped away, for by the time I was done clerking all the cases it was 1am or so..then went to settle all the non-urgent passives. The nurses were a big help really - advising what's done normally, helping prepare all the blood tubes or just assisting with difficult plugs. and thankfully most of them understood that it would take some time for me to attend to their requests. And eventually ran through most of the orders I gave with MO too, who was a big help. Finally at around 3+ had settled everything! was tempted to just forget about dinner and sleep instead but had nice hot noodles anyway. set an alarm and fell asleep with the lights on..had calls throughout but thankfully nothing was urgent till a chest pain came along! was instantly awake and surprisingly calm (probably the sleep?) and went down straight. Luckily patient was ok and it wasnt anything serious - (but had quite a lot of thought before coming to that conclusion; just the weight of such a decision was cary!)..Another 30 mins of brief sleep followed, to be interuppted by a chest pain again! and this time as I walked into the ward, I was alerted to a seizing patient. gosh!! was momentarily stunned but thankgod, the fits stopped and turned out he had a known history so it was ok..It was about 5+ by now, settled the accumulated changes and had a relatively quiet morning. Strangely, by the time the night ended, was feeling much more confident of the passives and just writing out orders and plans in the notes :)
The next day wasnt too bad, just that our team hit a new high for admissions (my call!) so there was quite a bit of work to do. J came down to help too (was a huge help, just phychologically too) and had a nice lunch w j & ky, reliving what felt like war stories! Managed to go postcall at 2+ (thks to very nice team) but strangely wasnt that tired when I came home - if anything, only the feet hurt so much! Slept for about 3 hours but woke up with horrible dreams of nurses calling me! and had hallucinations of hp ringing all the time, making me check my phone almost compulsively!
So that was my 1st call..lasting memories will be that of phone ringing (and the hallucinations after) and feet hurting! :p but i survived! thanks loads to the various ppl who msged me, with assurance that the sun will definitely rise the next day! :D
