Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Hour by Hour

Anyone curious about all of the fun and excitement that is squeezed into my average day on the ortho trauma service?  Here's what today looked like:

4:10am - alarm goes off.  lots of negative thoughts race through my head that essentially revolve around the fact that I don't want to get out of my nice warm bed at such an early hour.  i know I have just 20 minutes until I have to be pulling out of the garage though, so I'm up and moving right away.

4:25am - throw a piece of bread in the toaster and slather on some almond butter and cherry preserves.

4:30am - in the car headed to work.  enjoy my PB&J toast along the way.

4:40am - pull into parking deck at work.

4:45am - review the ortho admissions from overnight and update our list of trauma patients.  print patient notes and review any important events from overnight.

5:15am - hit the floors and start rounding on my patients.  you can imagine how thrilled patients are to be awoken at this hour for me to poke and prod at their injured extremities.

6:00am - finish rounding (rare morning with only 4 patients to see). finish reading articles on pediatric non-traumatic cervical disorders.

6:15am - caribou coffee time!

6:30am - trauma checkout and peds ortho conference

8:00am - no nurse practitioners to cover the floor and consults, so I assume control of "the bomb" (the name we have ever so thoughtfully assigned to the pager that receives all ortho floor questions and consults for the entire hospital).

8:02am - consult #1.

8:05am - quick breakfast of overnight protein oats and strawberries while reviewing the xrays of consult #1.

8:10am - consult #2.

The morning continues with a total of 4 consults.

11:45am - sit down at a computer to update our patient list.  just 5 seconds after sitting down the pager is going off.  it's Major (i.e. the highest acuity trauma section of the ED).  you can only guess that it's never good to be paged by them.  consult #5 comes my way.

12:30pm - quick slice of whole wheat veggie pizza, steamed veggies, and apple while reviewing morning xrays with my upper level residents

12:45pm - yet another consult from major.

1:30pm - pediatric ED.  Consult #6.  put a long arm cast on a wiggly 2 year old.  not an easy task.

2:00pm - if the same nurse from the floor pages me another time (I've already received 10+ pages from her today), I'm going to get angry

2:30pm - issues with patient on the floor.  time to be the tough guy and refuse to continue to increase pain meds.

3:00pm - major calling again with consult #7.  another broken bone, another cast.

3:20pm - back to the floor to fill out paperwork for a patient going to a nursing home.

3:30pm - consult #8.

4:30pm - finally caught up on consults/floor problems.  head to the surgeon's lounge to do some massive list updating and review xrays from consults.  hungry again - banana, granola bar, water.

5:00pm - our night float resident arrives and we review pending films and chat for a bit.

5:10pm - time to escape!  quickly change into running clothes.

5:20pm - throw bag in my car and head out for a run from the hospital.  try to forget about work and clear my head with a 5.5 mile run.  BEAUTIFUL weather makes that pretty easy to do!

6:08pm - in the car and headed home.  hit charlotte "rush-hour" traffic (nothing compared to atlanta, but frustrating nonetheless)

6:32pm - arrive home.  14 hours after I left.  shower.

7:00pm - dinner time - reheated spaghetti squash, black beans, and avocado salsa. watch national news.

7:30pm - catch up on the 50 million emails I received over the course of the day that I was too busy to deal with earlier.

8:33pm - typing this blog post.  not really sure why I'm wasting time doing this when I should be curled up in bed.

8:34pm - pushing publish. plan to grab something sweat to eat then headed to bed.  need my beauty sleep to do it all again tomorrow.

And that is the glorious life as an orthopaedic surgery intern.

No comments:

Post a Comment