Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Day In The Life

I realized the other day that no one knows what I do all day when I was trying to explain something about my day to Danny and he had a very glazed-over look. So here's what I did yesterday.

4:55am- alarm; clothes already laid out from the night before
5:10am- out the door; eat breakfast in the car
5:15am- see 3-4 patients, write notes and orders
6:15am- find a resident to co-sign all my notes and orders
6:30am- 'run the list';  aka sit down with the whole surgery team and briefly discuss each patient and the plan for the day
7am- conference (sometimes a lecture, sometimes a small group discussion of a topic)
8am- OR cases (it take ~45 minutes to clean the room between cases, in which times I eat, pee and check on labs/imaging that I ordered in the morning)
4pm- meet as team to 'afternoon round' aka- literally stick our heads into each patients room to make sure they are still alive. we seriously just check whether or not they are alive. I'm not exaggerating.
6pm- get a page that there is an emergency case that I should scrub in on
9pm- finish the case (still haven't had dinner)
9:30pm- get home. eat cereal in bed as I watch HGTV. Everything else seemed like too much work to make; so cereal it was.

Normally my day is done around 6pm. But I thought I'd get more sympathy if I posted an exception where I had to stay til 9pm. Just kidding. I don't want sympathy. I love every minute of what I do. Even the minutes from 6pm-9pm when I'm super hungry.

You'll notice that showering hasn't made it into the schedule yet. On normal days I shower after I run in the evening. But I haven't figured out when I'm supposed to do it on long days. I'm already pushing how little food and sleep I can function on. I'd rather be stinky than so tired that I'm stupid.

2 comments:

  1. I think I would be concerned to know my doctor had only been awake for 20 minutes when they saw me.

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  2. make a note...you owe yourself a nice long nap and hour long soak in the tub. glad you are having such fun with your scalpels

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