starting at 11 pm tonight, i will endure my last 8 hours of seeing patients as a medical student. i will also be seeing adult patients for the last time, EVER. pretty exciting stuff, right? tell that to the right side of my brain, because it is prodding the left with a big stick and saying, ‘sleep now? we like to sleep!’. ugh.
my penultimate night call sucked. lots of sitting around as i watched a friday night (that i could have spent in myriad other preferable ways) drift slowly, SLOWLY by. i saw only 2 patients: one with a broken nose and another woman who was pregnant and had nausea and vomiting. the only spike in endorphins i had was when i was asked to call plastics for a consult on ms. broken nose, because they are notorious for NOT wanting medical students to contact them, ever. in fact, they used to have an answering machine recording that said, “if you are a medical student, please hang up.” things worked out, though. i didn’t reveal my identity until they came down, which was key.
my shift ended at 11 that night. at 10:15 pm, i finally decided to focus all of my energies into looking as pathetic and sad as possible so that someone would take pity and tell me to go home. amazingly, my plan worked! at 10:30, the attending happened to gaze in my direction and asked, “how long are you here for?”. when i said, “11”, he asked if i would like to go home. i let out a fully uncensored, no-holds-barred, “YES!!!” which was slightly embarrassing, but it was worth it because i was able to book it out of there 30 minutes early to see josh and make us a late dinner (very euro of us, right?).
8 hours. or, i guess maybe 7 and a half! one can only dream . . .
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