Well, I'm over my cold. Thankfully, it didn't stick around. I was on call all day yesterday. It was my first weekend call. It wasn't too bad. I can say that being on call for anesthesia is tons better than being on call during my intern year. There are other residents around, and I always have an attending there if I get into a bad situation. Basically, I'm not lonely on call anymore.

So between the 4 of us, there were probably 12 cases. I did 4. My first one was some lady who seemed pretty retarded from her years of drug use. She had a submandibular abscess that was about to close off her airway. It was really gross. Her induction was interesting. We used ketamine since we didn't know if she was pregnant or not. She really flipped out. She sounded like she was having sex.

My next case was just an I&D, but what pissed me off was the orthopedic resident got snarky with me because the case took too long to start. I told her we just got out of another case, it's not like we've been sitting around all morning. She was then mad because her case got bumped for the submandibular abscess. Well, I don't make the schedule, plus, that case was an emergency...hers isn't. My attending was pissed when I told him later what she said.

My next case was a guy who got hit on his motorcycle by a truck. He ruptured his spleen and was bleeding inside his belly from it. That was kind of exciting because we were pushing blood really fast into him. It's pretty cool watching people go from pale to pink after they get some blood in them.

The last one was a 3 hour monstrosity and by then I was pretty tired. A typical car wreck vicim with lots of fractures that they had to reduced and fixate. I had no idea it would take 3 hours. I should have gone to the bathroom before the case started.

I'm still too chicken to extubate by myself. I can't quite get the feel for how you know exactly when to pull the tube so they don't bronchospasm. Plus, I don't quite have the timing right on when you turn down the gas and let the patient start waking up. AND, since I'm at a teaching institution, the surgery residents take about 4 times longer to do a case then the real world, so the timing is tricky. I always end up just turning off the gas when the case is over and then have every one stand around an embarassingly long time waiting for the patient to wake up. Oh well. I had to wait on them. They can wait on me.

I've figured out anesthesia is the black sheep of medicine. All the surgery departments hate us. I don't know if they're jealous or what, but they all bad mouth us. They get pissy if it takes us 30 minutes to prep for a case because I'm a new resident and maybe I can't get the arterial line in fast enough, but yet they take an extremely long time in their cases. It's pretty hypocritical if you ask me. We constantly have to remind them that they take a long time, too.

It just bothers me to see surgery residents who are my equal that think they can talk down to me. I need to start standing my ground, because if I don't, it will just get worse. The sad part is, they learned this behavior was okay from their attendings.