Independence Day

One last song of the day to end about a year-long tradition

Song of the Day: Hallelujah - Jeff Buckley

Just woke up from a 5 hour nap. Spent the weekend (Fri eve --> Sun morning) doing two night shifts at the Veterans hospital. While I wished I had had this time off to do fun things with my July 4th weekend, on the other hand it did feel kind of good to be working for our veterans on the Independence Day. After all, our veterans have sacrificed so much to keep our freedom and independence from tyranny a reality.

Each night the entire inpatient medicine ward was covered by two housestaff -- myself and a resident. The way we split up the duties, I did "cross-cover" (managing all the patients on the floor) while the more experienced resident handled new patients that came in during the night. This meant that I was managing up to 28 patients at once -- quite the challenge! I put my best effort forth and am very proud to say that everything went very well. Most times getting paged means making small changes to medication orders or adjusting fluids / electrolytes / or oxygen requirements. I felt I could handle 80-90% of the issues on my own with my knowledge gained to date in medical school and beyond. For a couple of the more complicated issues -- for example when a patient who recently had a liver transplant and was on immunosuppressants suddenly developed fever / chills -- I rapidly formed my own opinion of what I _should_ do but called the more experienced resident to make sure. The nurses are also often an excellent source of info, as they see the same patterns day in / day out.

Last night I only got about 1/2 hour of sleep, curled up in my green-blue scrubs in the intern call room, clinging to a pager on vibrate mode to wake me up at a moment's notice if a patient should suddenly "go south". While the lack of sleep was a little painful, it did feel really special to be awake and ordering lab tests, drugs, therapies, checking up on my patients, taking a focused history, doing portions of the physical exam -- all these things on my own in the middle of the night in a large hospital -- with the simple purpose of guarding the health of these veterans until the day shift team arrives. It was the least I could do on Independence Day weekend for those who guarded the country in Vietnam, Korea, and beyond.