My First Call

Being on call in medical school is much different than being on call in residency. We have 2 different types of call as interns. One person does adult/pedi admit and pedi floor call. The other person does adult floor call. I haven't had adult floor call. But it is much much nicer because you just occasionally get a patient complaining of something minor (if it hasn't been ordered yet, like prn meds). Or go to code blue (which doesn't happen that often either). You mostly get to sleep, watch movies, etc.

But I had admit call. Initially I was optimistic until I realized I finished a long day of seeing patients and doing discharges. I was tired and didn't want to do anything. After getting dinner, I met with my senior for the night to get an idea of what to do. Since I haven't had peds yet, I wasn't excited to have to deal with peds. I was given a handbook 2 weeks ago on everything I need to know for peds, but I haven't had time to read it yet. It's a very to the point book and tells you exactly what to do. But you still have to know what to look for. I had 2 admissions before midnight. I then had several pages from the nursery telling me what the bilirubin & RBC count were. How annoying? In my mind, I'm like, "Stop calling me! I don't know what those numbers mean." Eventually I was forced to open the pedi book, to figure out who is okay to go home and who needs bili lights, blah, blah, blah. My senior was kind enough to help me figure out what to do with these results. It was just overwhelming to have to think about kids and adults at the same time. Plus one kid had a high white count, that I wasn't checked out about and nothing was in the chart stating that they were aware of the white count. So we had to assume possible sepsis. Especially since the kid was hypothermic and the nurse put the baby in the warmer bed without telling us. So even though I was taught how to do a baby exam at orientation, I didn't feel comfortable doing the exam. Anyways baby looked fine and was eating better and repeat labs were normal.

My next admit call is in 2 weeks. Then I have floor call 4 days later. So this month I have 3 calls. My senior wrote down some pages of the book to read for next time. So I will try to be prepared next time. Thank goodness, I didn't have any pedi admits or newborn exams in the middle of the night. My other classmates have had it worse than me, but they weren't on inpatient service. I learned from one of them that they had 7 newborn discharges and that the paperwork was easy. It was just that they had to spend time to educate every mom on signs and symptoms of sepsis, jaundice, etc.

Overall, call sucks. But maybe it'll get easier next time.

After I finished call at 7am, I had to present my 3 admit patients and then had my patients to round on. I was tired. But I was so glad to be back in the day time. I finished seeing my patients and did 2 discharges. Got lunch and hung out with other interns for a little bit and went home at 1pm. The good thing is I get one day off every week and my day off this week is Thursday. So I had 1.5 days off if you include Wed afternoon.