Thursday was my first call night of the year. It started out pretty slowly, with no new admissions and no issues with any patients for the first few hours. Then, about 6pm, it all started. The service "caps," or reaches its limit, at eight new admissions. We got our eight within about five hours. I ended up evaluating a leg fracture, possible bowel ischemia, pancreatitis, and a new rash in a patient with autoimmune disease. Around midnight, the resident, intern and I sat down to talk about our patients and write our notes. I was able to get all of my notes written in about an hour. (It's amazing how much easier it is to write a note without the book reports we had to do as third years.) I stuck around to help with any cross-cover issues, but even that was slow.

I slept from about 1am to 5am Friday morning, then got up to get ready for rounds (which are always early on post-call days). I goofed a little on one of my presentations, mostly because I totally lost my train of thought mid-sentence. Nobody seemed to care. After rounds, the team got some coffee (chai for me) and got to work putting in consults and following up on all the stuff that was done overnight. Then it was time for Morning Report, which, amazingly, I made it through without nodding off even once. I attribute that partly to caffeine, but mostly to learning about the "Violet Beauregard" species of zebrafish, which swells up like a blueberry when a certain gene is knocked out. I also went to noon conference, though I shouldn't have because I kept falling asleep. This is kind of pitiful, since when I'm taking call for real four hours of sleep will be a ridiculously high amount.

The rest of the weekend was basically spent either sleeping or socializing. Friday night, I went out to dinner at a place where the menu included "spoonfuls" of soup. Probably won't be going back there. Then I went in for rounds on Saturday morning, which were pretty short. Saturday night, I went to a friend's birthday party, which included fireworks when the cake was brought out. Not sparklers, not firecrackers. Fireworks, up in the sky. Crazy!

I guess I'll post more about this week, next week. Bye bye for now!