11 September 2006

bargaining for your life

so i'm being fucked at work.

that's totally not as sexy as it sounds.

no, i was called today by the chief resident to see if i was willing to switch one of my MICU (that's Medical Intensive Care Unit, not to be confused with the SICU, CTICU, CCU, NICU, or PICU, which stand for Surgical, Cardiothoracic, Cardiac Care, Neuro/Neonatal (there's two) and Pediatrics, respectively) two-week blocks for OPD (that stands for OutPatient something, not sure, but it's a combo of clinic days (easy 9a-5p), ER shifts (7a-7p, or 10a-10p, or 7p-7a (ugh)), and day float on the medical floors (hit or miss, 8a-5:30p). apparently some of the other interns are asking for time off requests and one of the solutions would be to replace my MICU time with OPD.

i am loathe to do this for the following reasons:

i actually enjoy working in the MICU. it's critcal care, which is very relevant to anesthesiology, so i feel like i'm learning something that i may actually use in the future, as opposed to tinkering with someone's nighttime insulin dose to get their sugars in the just-right-range. you get to place lines and do proccedures and the nursing staff is great.

as previously stated, the MICU is q4 overnight call. so when you're on, it's no joke. sometimes you get lucky and sleep (that happened to me twice), and sometimes you don't (that happened to me twice). but then you go home the next day by 11am - and if you managed to sleep that night, that's a free half day right there. then the next day you write 1 or 2 notes and go home after rounds, which can be as early as noon sometimes. then the next day you only write 1 or 2 notes (easy ones) so you can make it to clinic for the afternoon, and you're done by 5pm. pretty nice again. THEN you're on call the next day. but if you're not on call on the weekends, you get them off. NICE.

so, today was my short day. i wrote 2 notes and was audi5000, home by 2pm (this is actually later than usual).

also, the start time in the MICU is 8am. NICE. i've watched more matt lauer in the past 2 wks than i ever have, ever.

OPD sucks butt (so i've heard). i actually haven't done it yet, but the way it's set up, there's NO early days. you either put in a solid 12 hours in the ER (which is supposed to be mind numbingly busy and hectic here - my hospital has one of the busiest ERs in NY state), which can be overnight (thus ruining your normal-life schedule), a full day in clinic (not so bad, but you'll never be out before 5pm), or do day float at one of the away hospitals (annoying because #1 you cover patients you don't know and #2 it's at an away hospital, so you have to either take a shuttle (which only runs like 8 times a day and stops by 5:15pm) or a taxi (which, while the program does give you vouchers for (only 2 wks at a time), i've heard the service can take up to 30 mins to respond)).

so, i told my chief resident that i would rather not switch out, because the MICU is more relevant to me, etc etc. and he seemed to get the picture. then i decided to do some finagling, since i had him on the line. i'm scheduled for 2 weeks of ICU at one of the away hospitals, and i hear it's absolutely MISERABLE over there. you're on call q3 and the in-between days you still don't finish until 7pm or so. and then you have to call the taxi to get home. nightmare. also, i'm on call on thanksgiving. so i asked the chief, since i dont have transportation, would it be possible to switch my ICU over there for MICU over here? he said he'll try.. sweet.

then i did more research. i know i have 7 months on the medical floors. SUCKS. but i'm a prelim, and i figure, hey, prelims get screwed, that's how it goes. but then i checked out our block schedule ... i'm the ONLY ONE with 7 months on the floor. everyone else has 6. including the prelims. and some lucky few have managed only 5 floor months this year. so i emailed the chief and let him know that, and told him i'd gladly pick up more ICU time in exchange to get off the floors for a month.

eagerly awaiting his response. hopefully this will save me a thanksgiving call. we'll see.

and in other news...

i'm running the philadelphia half marathon in 6 days. i was going to go for a run today but my right hip has been making a funny popping noise sometimes and it hurts today for the first time. so i'm gonna lay off for a day and try it tomorrow.

the US open was some good shit, was it not? sharapova steamrolls to a victory, and federer brings out some good matches with blake and roddick. when i was on call on saturday, there was a lull in the afternoon so we (me, the fellow, and the attending) were all watching the men's semifinals in an empty patient room.

and of course, today is the 5th anniversary of 9/11. in the MICU we observed that by sneaking peeks at patient's televisions while we were rounding. there's like a million events going on in the city in remembrance of it. i can remember exactly how i heard about the towers back in 2001. schlarb came into my room and told me that the weather channel said something about a plane crashing into the tower. so we turned on cnn, and chuck woke up in time for us to watch the 2nd plane hit. at that point i think we woke up everyone in the house, i don't remember exactly. i remember being pissed off that i had to go to work and then being told we couldn't have the radio on because it was depressing our customers (we turned it back on after gary left). after i got back i remember watching CNN for hours.

gothamist asks readers to remember where they were when the towers fell. as expected, it's quite depressing to scroll through the comments.

i'd also like to note that the WWB was born only a week or so before the attacks. my man charles said (this was before blogger had spell-check):

well.. I don't know what to say about this except for the fact that I am shocked and horrified. The one thing that I can hope for is that maybe the countries of the world will realize that all of our petty disputes are pointless and we should try to cooporeate on an even greater level. My biggest fear in all this is that there will be some kind of a retailiatory attack on a country, thereby potentialy causeing some kind of massive war.

unfortunately for every living breathing human being on the planet, nobody listened to charles.

this educational lesson brought to you by dr. j around 2:32 PM |

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your hop is making a popping noise? mine did that all of the time when i played tennis back in the day. not cool.

dropped by Anonymous on 11 September, 2006 15:31 [*]

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I don't recall ever writing that, but I SWEAR to god that my spelling has, on average, drastically improved since those brain dump, publish my comments immediately days.

Anyways, damn dude, you got a whole lot of doctoring going on.

dropped by Anonymous on 12 September, 2006 04:19 [*]

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1. I didnt understand anything in the first paragraph.

2. Charles has powers beyond belief

3. Is there a chiropractor in the hospital? have him knock that hop back into place

4. (bursting into song with arms flailing) THERES NO BUSINESS LIKE SHOW BUSINESS

LLLLLIIIIIIBBBBRRRRAAAAARRRRYYYYYY

dropped by Anonymous on 13 September, 2006 16:18 [*]

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my hop digs a good spell check

dropped by Anonymous on 14 September, 2006 04:06 [*]

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clearly thebeff doesn't watch Gray's Anatomy

neither do I

dropped by Anonymous on 21 September, 2006 18:56 [*]

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drop some science: