Mean Me

I'm starting to be mean. I've noticed when I'm on call, I have a lower threshold of getting mad and speaking my mind than I normally do. I start to say what I'm thinking without keeping my mouth shut. My first victims Sunday morning were some construction workers who came into the call room area at 8:30am and starting doing work. If that wasn't bad enough, they knocked on my door, woke me up, and said they needed in my room and would be there all day working on the cables in the ceiling. I'd had enough. "Look", I said, "I'm here for the next 30 hours and this is the ONLY time I'm going to get any sleep..." I lost that battle. My pager started going off soon after that anyway. I apologized later to those guys. They were just doing their job.

There weren't anymore victims until about 6:30am the next day, when I got paged with the Rapid Assessment Team to go see a patient (who is supposed to be in dire straights for us to get called). I get to the pt's room and there was no nurse to be found to clue me in on why we were called. The patient was just calmly lying there and I asked her if she was okay and she said she was. I went out to the nurses station and asked who the nurse was for that room and why is nobody in there to fill us in on why we were called. She explained she was standing in the hall to direct all the responders what room to go to. Well, that's great and all but she's supposed to be in the patient's room helping us since she's the only one who knows the patient. I was more than a little short with her. I felt bad later and apologized. I was right, it is a rule that when you page the team you must have somebody at all times in the patient's room so we know what's going on, but I thought long and hard later about how I came off. Here I am, this young, snot nosed doctor, getting snippy with a 50-something nurse who probably has more years of nursing on her belt than I have years of breathing. In my exhaustion from being up all night, I forgot to treat her like a person. I hope I don't let that happen again.

So that night, I had 3 rapid assessment team calls, 8 hospital admissions, and a code blue (that I successfully resuscitated only to find out that the pt had a signed DNR in her chart that somehow none of the nurses knew about). I felt really bad about that one. She did die later that night.