blogging on call

by: poppyseed

Wed Apr 08, 2009 at 20:26:58 PM PDT

short blog today. on call. carrying 40 patients. pager goes off every ten minutes. am three admissions into the night and have two more to go before i cap and it's someone else's turn. am also 14 hours into my thirty hour shift and am starting to have my usual trouble remembering what i was originally doing when i'm interrupted in the middle of being interrupted in the middle of doing something (which makes two interruptions and makes me feel like a ping pong ball in a clothes dryer)

poppyseed :: blogging on call

samples from the day:
1) had to talk to my dying cancer patient about the fact that she is bleeding to death and i can't stop it. she wants to die at home, her son, who lives with her, wants her to die in the hospital and is busy not returning my calls and avoiding every family meeting i try to set up. in our last discussion, i had to explain about calling the mortuary when someone dies at home while sitting at a nurses' station with people shouting all around me. this is our fifth such talk in as many days. she told me this morning she's not afraid to die. i asked her to please tell her son that.
2) sat down to lunch and was surrounded by union reps, including the sitting president of the house officers' union, on a whirlwind tour of "safety net" facilities, which is the euphamism for whatever you want to call our poor, overloaded inner city hospital, groaning at the seams with poor patients with no homes and no doctor and no family and no hope. she told me to "tell my story" and all i could think of was "i do, and it makes me feel better, but my pager still goes off every ten minutes and i'm still up to my neck in pages." (and, oh yeah, when is this lady going to stop smiling at me and let me leave?)
3) and this is the forth time i got paged to go draw blood for some poor lady (because there's some hospital policy that says doctors draw blood at certain times, from certain lines, one certain wards-- every ward is different, i'll never get them straight.)

now it's off to the call rooms, where there's dinner squirreled away for the call team (because the cafeteria closes too soon for call teams to eat, so we order out-- the only thing i like about call, other than the patients, is the take out food-- cold, piled on the call room table like a secret, eaten in a hurry before the pager goes off again...)

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What is health justice? How are health & human rights fiercely connected to the wellness of our neighborhoods? How do we reframe policy debates? How do we continue dreaming and building instead of just reacting & surviving? And how do we support each other in our healing?

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