Labor Day

I have Labor Day off and it's much needed.  My recovery time post-call is becoming longer and longer and my ability to concentrate and read during the day is steadily declining.  As my attending recently stated, our post-call EEG would surely show "diffuse slowing".

  I'm three calls away from being done with the MICU until third year.  At times I regret this because we have a great team right now: our attending is 2-3 years out of fellowship and has a dry humor that makes rounds bearable, we always have one fellow on, one IM senior, one IM PGY-2, one IM intern, one EM PGY-3, and an EM intern (me).  The overnight team consists of either an IM senior and intern or the EM senior and me, each with a fellow for additional support.  With exception of mediating vent settings, the EM senior is far more proficient than the fellow at procedures and management of acute events.  I like seeing one of ours in this light because it gives me hope that some time not too far in the future I will be able to handle this 16 patient ICU all night.  Saturday night was truly the busiest on call night so far.  I slept maybe a half an hour, ran a code, put in three IJs, did two admissions, declared someone dead, and did not sit down once.  

Our nurses are very vigilant and for the most part anticipate most disasters prior to them coming on.  They don't call us for minutiae and when we do get called, we don't hesitate to see the patient ASAP because they are most likely crumping, if the nurse is worried.  Saturday night was the night of flash pulmonary edema and septic shock.  We were giving out nitro paste like it was candy.  Anyone who was on FM was on BiPAP by the end of the night.  Anyone that wasn't getting Lasix was getting lines and being resuscitated.  It was dizzying. 

I ran my first code that night.  An 84 yo F was found unresponsive in the surgery ward.  There was a question of beta blockade vs. vasovagal and she was found with a pulse in the 30s, sating 70% on 5L NC.  We bagged her, put on pacer pads, and gave atropine and glucagon.  She recovered pretty well, but was transferred to the ICU for closer monitoring of her bradycardia.  When she arrived, however, the picture changed.  She was hypotensive to the 70s with a HR of 50 and we couldn't get the pulse ox to work because her extremities were so cool.  She was clearly in shock.  When we looked at her labs, her hemoglobin had dropped by 4g/dL in 12 hours and we realized she was actively bleeding somewhere.  Given that she was three days post laparoscopic hiatal hernia repair and was tender on abdominal exam without any other apparent localizing findings, we decided to scan her.  Not surprisingly she turned out to have a pronounced hepatic subcapsular bleed with free fluid in the colic gutter.  Surgery was called and we ordered four units and started bolusing her while we were waiting.  I was struggling with her line.  She was in the process of getting discharged home when she coded around 5pm and had been INTed in the AM without any PO intake that day.  Her veins were collapsed; I could barely make out her IJ.  When I finally did get blood return and started feeding in the wire, it kept meeting resistance four to five inches in and nothing I could do would make it go further.  My senior suggested turning around the wire, which I had never heard of.  I fed the wire in backwards with the hooked side last and it worked like a charm.  We resuscitated her with packed rbcs, NS boluses, and got her a bear hugger, which allowed us to finally get a read from her pulse ox.  The next morning a good 15 hours after the code, a surgical attending finally first laid hands on her.  She dodged the surgery question with lets get q6 H/Hs and a repeat CT, which prompted a whole argument with the radiologist, who said it was entirely ridiculous: what change were they expecting to see?  Ultimately, I realized I had to make peace with the fact that I could not single-handedly do a laparotomy and that I would also make mistakes in my career - I should be understanding and work to the best of my ability.  It's a lot easier to turn down an 80+ year old from surgery when you see her after she has been volume resuscitated and narcotized and believe she is not a surgical candidate, than when you code her and are tremulously holding atropine in the radiology suite watching her brady down to the 50s.  A pro pos we still have not elucidated the reason for her bradycardia in the setting of hypotension.  Pain with increased vagal stimulation? 

With all the action we had that night, the emotional burden of declaring someone dead that was perfectly healthy three days prior and now on his death bed from severe sepsis secondary to pneumonia, as well as rankling with surgery all night long, I was more than happy to come home with the prospect of a day off.  I DID leave that day with the feeling that I had helped save someone's life that night and that I had become an indispensible part of the ICU team.  Over the last 24 hours it has really sunk in that I have a pretty powerful ability and after all of those long nights of studying and wondering if I would every make it, I was finally here and it was entirely worth it. 

Overdrive

So, I've survived my first full rotation and am well into my second. I've learned a couple of things. The first: it's close to impossible to make time to read in your off-duty time. Essentially, I've been reluctant to read because I feel that I'm giving so much of my time to the hospital that it would be an injustice to deprive myself of free time yet again to "do medicine". On the other hand, I recognize that not keeping up with my continued education is going to be a disservice to me.

Truthfully, I'm still waiting for the balance to kick in. There is the thinking that if I just get through another couple of days, I'll finally be settled in enough to dedicate some free time to exercise and reading rather than recovering from the last 30 hours on-call. Maybe I should just bit the bullet, head back to the gym, start up my reading routine, and stop with the delayed gratification BS. It's just so much easier to make excuses!

Secondly, I've learned that the uncertain feeling you have as a med student doesn't wear off simply by graduating. You still report to your senior and your senior still reports to the fellow and the fellow still reports to the attending. There is an uncanny ability to find out an intern; it's in your opening when you call a consultant or in your closing when you try to transfer/admit a patient to the floor. Sure, there is a component of choppy presentations, and an inability to sell your cause, but mostly I think it is the uncertainty with which you communicate. It's easy to discredit your efforts of working up a patient and formulating a plan when your counterpart has the ease of experience and confidence on his side. I make a real effort not to be overly apologetic and stick to my instinct when I have a reasonable argument to back it, however the later it gets into my on-call shift, the more reluctant I am to put in the work. At the end of the day it's far easier to reveal yourself for who you are: a new doctor.

The third: it's impossible to schedule any appointments unless you're post call. With that said, the WORST possible post call activity is sitting in a doctor's office waiting to be seen. Yesterday, I had to get three fillings two hours post MICU call. It was painful. I was exhausted - emotionally and physically - and suddenly having my teeth drilled into seemed like the greatest form of torture. As the tears started pouring down my eyes, it occurred to me that lack of sleep certainly makes you a pitiful wreck of a human being with an inability to think rationally and most definitely an inability to sympathize with anything other than one's own needs. How exactly does this state of being translate into better care for our patients? To top it off my dentist thought it would be interesting to me to talk about his Vietnam experience as a medical professional. I almost passed out right there.

With all of this seemingly depressing commentary, I should add that the experience is made worthwhile by the team you work with and the support you get outside of the hospital. In my current rotation in the MICU, the team effort is great. All the residents are looking out for each other, encouraging you to sign out your tasks for someone else to complete. The nurses give helpful suggestions and have not once made me feel like a klutz when I have to redo my orders a million times and forget to write for morning labs or get a creatinine on a renal failure patient. The attendings cut you slack for the most part because you're new to all of this and your senior forgives you a million times over for creating extra work for them by your inability to dispo confidently. Sometimes I almost look forward to my Q3 call days because I know that means there will be postcall time to spend with my husband, my puppy, and my bed. There's nothing better than banana pancakes and the outlook of a day of rest when you come home. The next day you forget how painful the recovery was, forget how your tooth is still aching, and you hate dentists, and you find the strength to do it all over again.