Photo courtesy of Rachel

It’s 6:45 pm on Saturday, and I just woke up.

In my defense, I only got to bed at 10:30 this morning. I’m “post long call,” meaning I just finished a 30-hour shift in the hospital. During the Surgery rotation at my current hospital, med students are assigned to the Trauma team when we’re on call. So when traumas come in, we dash off to the trauma bay along with the residents to help.

Last night wasn’t too bad, only one real trauma—a ridiculously intoxicated, uncooperative, 26-year-old female drunk driver. She was in pretty good shape, considering that when her car collided head on with another car at 30 mph, she wasn’t wearing a seat belt, and had to be extracted from her car using the “Jaws of Life.” Because she was drunk to the point of being combative, and wouldn’t lie still for the CT-scan, we had to sedate and intubate her. The scan showed no bleeding in the brain, but she did have a Grade 3 liver laceration, which earned her an admission to the ICU due to the risks of major hemorrhage. I got to staple together the gaping lacerations on her knees. Lots of fun.

In general, “fun” mostly describes my week on Vascular Surgery. The other word that describes it? Exhausting.

Every day I’ve been up at 4:15 am to get to the hospital by 4:45 am to start pre-rounding (see and examine my patients alone, without the residents) on my assigned patients (all of two, but I work really slow).

At 6:00 am the army that is the rest of the Vascular team arrives: 5th year and 4th year surgical residents, surgical intern, anesthesia intern, physicians’ assistant (PA), a nurse practitioner (NP), and student NP. We meet for a moment to hear about any overnight events on the list of patients, which runs 20-25 long. Then we split into groups to see patients.

Usually morning rounds consist of talking to patients to see how they’re doing and performing a physical exam. On Vascular Surgery, morning rounding is more like being a member of the service pit during a NASCAR race. One person asks the patient how their night was, another listens to heart and lungs and uses the handheld Doppler ultrasound to locate peripheral pulses, and one to two people are changing the patient’s wound dressings. It’s chaos.

After morning rounds it’s off to the operating room, where as a medical student, you either observe from afar (don’t touch the sterile field!!), observe while scrubbed in, or stand around to retract or suction blood, so the surgeon has a good view of the area. While it’s awesome to have a front row seat to the operation, it can get really boring after a while. If you’re very lucky, you may be allowed to cut suture, or tie a few knots (I wasn’t that lucky this week).

In the afternoon, the anesthesia intern, NP, and PA round again to check in on the patients. If I’m not in the OR, I join them, write daily progress notes, work on discharge summaries, or do a post-operative check on patients who were operated on earlier in the day.

Sometime between 5 and 8 pm I get to go home. Too tired to make anything good, I end up eating a crappy dinner of instant noodles, PBJ, or whatever’s lying around, and attempt to study. I usually fall asleep while studying for the next day’s surgeries, and crawl into bed around 9-10 pm. Sometime around 2:30 am, I wake up in terror, thinking that I forgot to set my alarm and am late for work. I check the time, and fall back into fitful sleep. Wake up, rinse, repeat.

So, yeah, I’m exhausted. These are the time constraints of medical school that kept me from getting a new blog entry in last week.

Though really, that was one small item in a very long list.

Due to the time constraints of medical school I haven’t done my laundry in a month, been grocery shopping for three weeks, or run the dishwasher in two weeks. Up until today, I hadn’t showered for two days (I think, sadly it might’ve been longer). My boyfriend, who, during the weekday, drove 1.5 hours to get to the area where my hospital is, I saw for about 3.5 hours before I needed to get to bed, so I could be up to pre-round. He stayed up and watched TV.

While writing this and thinking about the topic, I’ve just remembered I completely forgot to fill out a mandatory evaluation, and mail a check for my friend’s bachelorette party. Oh well.

With 85% of my waking hours spent in the hospital, I have no idea what’s happening in that great wide world outside. There’s just no time. Apparently there is a volcano out there wreaking havoc on air travel?

At least I’ll have tomorrow off, though that day will be spent studying.

I’m tired again, so I think I’ll go back to bed. What an exciting Saturday.

Med school stole my life this week, but I’m too exhausted to care.

ODDS FACTS:

• The odds a driver involved in a fatal motor vehicle accident with a blood alcohol content of 0.08 or higher was female are 1 in 6.63.
• 1 in 4.55 adults report getting less sleep than needed to function at their best during the week.
• The odds an adult believes being overbooked prevents him or her from achieving a balanced life are 1 in 3.33.

Click here for the previous post.