I feel much better today, mentally and physically. My shoulder doesn’t hurt. My energy feels normal. I don’t feel like I need to nap all day. Hooray! I guess the extra rest worked. Luckily this has been a very quiet call weekend. I’ve answered a few quick calls, but I haven’t had to go into the hospital yet! I feel INCREDIBLY happy about that. In truth, about 25% of my call weekends are like this. 25% are very busy. The other 50% are reasonable but still require in-person rounds on at least someone.
(Interestingly, my last call weekend in April was very busy, especially with new onset diabetes patients who all showed up quite sick and in need of ICU care. Probably because people had understandably been scared to get checked before things became dire. But I guess maybe now we’ve cleared most of this backlog.)
I started to enter panic mode when I felt a hint of sore throat yesterday but . . . it never amounted to anything. I was mostly horrified about the prospect of having to be tested, quarantined, etc. It’s not that I’m terrified of getting COVID19 — I mean, maybe I should be. But I am an otherwise healthy 39.99 year old (literally, lol) PLUS I have my suspicions that we all already had it (the cough referred to in this post). I certainly don’t want to give it to anyone else. But coming down with it personally is not something I worry much about.
(No, I haven’t gotten my antibodies tested. Josh has jokingly offered that rather than shell out for a test I can pay $150 for him to flip a coin and provide me with a ‘result’ that is about as useful as the out-of-pocket testing currently available right now, and he’s got a point.)
ANYWAY. I did not set out to write a viral-themed post; my apologies! Our nanny did work this weekend (both parents on call) but she only ended up coming in for 3 hours today, during which I swam with the big kids (phone poolside of course in case of work calls/secure texts coming through). For a call weekend . . . it has actually been quite nice.
I am going to try to restart 80DO tomorrow. I am just going to start over at Day 1 because a) I did almost nothing last week due to shoulder, then tiredness, etc and b) there’s no rush, is there!
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The matching suits kill! Good news on my end, my favorite attending ever (on Peds Endo! And we both had Hobonichis and compared planning notes) said she’d write me a letter for residency (I’m applying adult medicine, research track and deciding between my PhD specialty (Pulm) or Endo, which I just HAD to fall in love with two weeks before the pandemic). I didn’t think I’d be needing letters from the non IM folks, but advising this year has been “get what you can because everything is a mess and you may not get a sub-I”.
LOVED Endo, I couldn’t even believe how it was completely my happy place, and how the attendings invited me to a regional bench to bedside conference, and I got to just immerse myself in data again, and how metabolic problems are really really interesting, and how everyone seemed to be really happy with their jobs.
WAIT so there is another peds endo out there who uses a HOBONICHI!?!?!? I need to connect with this person! STAT! Email me if you don’t want to include details here 🙂 I am so thrilled you loved it!!
Heard that a critical care attending in his 30s in Detroit, otherwise healthy, ended up on ECMO. Survived! So, you *should* be scared of COVID, but only scared enough to make you avoid doing stupid things, not so scared that you are paralyzed and cannot function. 😉
I woke up today with post-nasal drip and some body aches and thought, hm. I wonder if I caught COVID from the nurse I worked with last week whose husband had it. But then I realized I was just sore from my boxing class and the pollen here today is insane. So glad you’re feeling better, and that call has been…. going.
Side point here: I did anesthesia in large part because I never want to think about endocrinology again, lol — THANK GOODNESS THERE ARE PEOPLE LIKE YOU WHO LOVE IT! Also, Peds Endo and metabolism is so much more interesting than adult. I had no idea that specialty even existed until I saw a presentation on ruling out metabolic disease in the ED and thought… ohhhhhh ketones!
@DV — If you like Endo or Pulm please please embrace those loves. They are so much more compatible with a research career than say, anesthesia, which I can tell you from personal experience.
@OMDG & @DV – Agree that endo can be fantastic for research even though research was (is) not my personal cup of tea! Had some wonderful mentors, Mike Freemark and Nancie Maciver at Duke in particular who have productive research careers AND do great clinical work and truly love both sides. Peds endos are generally happy, I have to say. (NOT ALWAYS and NOT ALL, but generally.)
While these one-off stories are certainly tragic, they aren’t the rule. There does seem to be a viral load component impacting severity which would explain why a young critical care doctor would get so sick. All the more reason to be grateful to those in the trenches. But as an early 40s healthy female in a largely outpatient specialty, I am with SHU. I actually expect to get it at some point (realistically we probably all should–not that we should try to get it, but expect to) and dread the quarantine piece of things as much as anything else.
I can’t even deal with A and G’s matching suits (obsessed w every time they match — hope the phase of them liking it lasts forever ha). Glad the rest helped and that call has been calm!
They still love it! Annabel picked them out 🙂
Those Mini Boden suits are cute! We bought our daughter’s from Hanna Andersson this year and love it! But I’m not sure if there will be any pools open here this summer lol!
we are lucky that our rental has a pool in the backyard. I initially felt like it was totally unnecessary b/c there’s a community pool too but now I am so glad to have it.