A Call Haiku

Pager anarchy

Stop hitting on the doctor!

Where is my pillow?

I composed this little poem in the hour I spent lying in bed this morning, which, admittedly, is an hour more than I usually get. And note how that's different from sleeping, because sleeping involves not having to answer your pager every ten seconds for things like "Hi, this is the nurse on the unit, and I was reading the patient's chart, and I saw that it says he once had tuberculosis when he was in prison, and I know you did a chest xray and cleared him before he came to the floor and all, but I was wondering, should he still be wearing a mask?"

No. That's what we meant by "cleared."

And I'll admit that the first draft went a little more like this:

Pager anarchy
Wait, how many syllables are supposed to be in the second line of a stupid haiku?
Where is my pillow?

Last night was crazy as usual. I was apparently on a single-handed mission to fill up the whole hospital in one night - not that I had a choice. We were "on delay" for two services, which means we can delay admission of some patients, but we still have to accept the ones from the local crisis center - plus, I got the usual Calls of Bizarreness from the wards - i.e., I had someone request to be put in restraints. What? Dude. If you're going to make me come all the way over there, at least do a reasonable job of acting out. You know, break something or scream a little. I also had to go to the Geropsychiatry unit to give a batty old woman a forced shot of something to calm her down before she hurt herself trying to escape (which, she got really mad at me for not helping her to do. She kept saying, "Hurry up and hold this up so I can get out before they get back." I said, no, I'm not going to help you, Ma'am. Who do you think we are, Thelma and Louise, here? But secretly, I was loving that she was so feisty). I hate going onto the Gero unit more than anything else, including going to the adolescent unit, and you know how much I hate that. The Gero unit at my state hospital is like a bad nursing home. It's smelly, a lot of the staff are bullies, and the patients are just so far gone. Dear God, don't ever let me get old like that.

And I'm on call again tomorrow night. Yee-haa. It's short call, though, so hopefully I'll be out at a reasonable hour tomorrow night. And then we switch services on Monday, which, I have to say, I'm a little sad about. I'm going to medicine (again), for real this time, in theory. At least my co-intern will be cool, but I'm not super excited about the medicine piece. Difficult, anti-social, and crazy though they may be, I've enjoyed my patients over the past month, and I've enjoyed the people I work with. And you know? I think I've really enjoyed the psychiatry. Imagine that.

But meanwhile, the weather's finally letting up a little, here. I'm going to try and enjoy it this weekend as much as I can before, oh wait, I'm on call again on Monday for Medicine. I'm so ready to be done with this call thing...and, oh, it's not even September yet....