Ugh.

So I'm sitting here procrastinating because I really just want to go to bed and what I actually have to do is get all my shit together and pack because I'm on call again tomorrow night.

Also, I made garlic spaghetti for dinner (ahh, the life of the single girl) and Maggie has been licking the bowl for ten minutes now. She literally is lying on the floor with one paw cradling the bowl and one paw on the rim. Guess she likes it. I thought it needed more garlic. Either way, I think we're both going to have stinky breath tonight. Not that anyone minds, really.

So I'm stalling and she's "cleaning" and of course there's CSI on in the background. Mi vida loca, people.

My last call, on Monday, was completely wretched. I got thirty minutes of sleep. Here's a brief overview. I get this call to go to the adolescent building, right? "Doctor, come quick, this girl we just admitted today is having a seizure!!" And so I page my moonlighter and leave word for her to come meet me, jump in my car, race over to the adolescent building, go flying up the stairs, and...am met by one of my favorite nurses, we'll call her Miss Luci, who starts shaking her head at me. So, apparently, this girl throws herself of the floor and starts flailing about, and it looks pretty real until Miss Luci goes over and touches her arm. And, miracle of miracle, the "seizure" stops. So Miss Luci looks at this girl, pointedly, and says, "Are you finished?" And the patient stops, looks up at her, and says, "....yeah.....I'm sorry....."

Have I mentioned my so very not wanting to do adolescent psychiatry?

So, fine. I write a note, and then I get paged down the street to the long-term adolescent building, for a sprained ankle. Okay. Then one of the forensics patients faints, a couple of other things happen, and I get to bed around 1:30. At two (so, not asleep yet), my pager goes off, and it's Miss Luci. Who says, "well, now we have a kid having an actual seizure."

So the short version of that is, I try to admit him to medical, the nurses have a fit (one of the nurses on the med unit tells the nurse from Adolescent, "She's just fussing." Um, hello? Does anyone realize how I have absolutely no power around here and really can only do what the attending tells me to do?), and the Adol nurses convince me that he'll be fine with them (and probably get more supervision) until morning - you know, when the regular practitioner gets there - and I shuffle off to bed, where I toss and turn and fret and worry because maybe I should have admitted him (I think he was actually better off where he was) and because the on-call attending wouldn't let me give him any Valium (it's a great acute anti-seizure drug, it's not just for calming down suburban housewives), and finally, finally start to drift fitfully off to sleep when the pager goes off again, and Miss Luci tells me, "He's seizing again."

Shit.

So I race over, again, and Miss Luci and two of the techs and I bring him back to Medical, and I load him with IV stuff per the attending, and, and, and, and then finally, right around 6, my head hits the pillow again. And I think, okay. I usually get up at 7 and round when I'm on call, but, I can delay that and sleep all the way until morning report at 8, right?

Sure.

Because at 6:30, the pager goes off again. And once again, it's Miss Luci. She slipped and fell and screwed up her knee. And since Medical On-Call covers employee health after hours....

Yeah....

I really like Miss Luci. But if I ever see that much of her again in one night, there'd better be margaritas involved, and we'd better be far, far away from State Hospital.

This rotation continues to drive me crazy, and I still have another month of it. Like, I almost stroked out this morning watching my attending trying to do an I&D (incision and drainage of a pus-filled infected thing), and I swear, his surgical technique could've been worse pretty much only if he'd dropped the forceps on the ground and stepped on them before using them. And then, there's things like...this morning, my attending called one of the moonlighters a "prostate." I swear to God, this is the story I got from the nurse, with the attending sitting next to her. Now, I know he's foreign, and I'm quite certain he must have meant "prostitute" (because said moonlighter often buys food for the people he's on with. Um, no honey, that's not prostitution, that's how you get people in hospitals to like you. Well, that, and not being a condescending jackass to them), but...dude....and then he couldn't quite grasp why I couldn't stop laughing at him...

In totally unrelated, and much better, news, both Bones and CSI premier this week! And then? The week after that? South Park is back! Squee! I'm going to fall in love with my DVR all over again....