Posting has been a little light due to a recent transplant marathon: one transplant after another, starting in the afternoon, and concluding the next morning. The best summary would be to say, that after doing so many of one procedure in a row, I knew the steps in my sleep – which was good, because that was what it was close to by the end. . . I still wasn’t able to satisfy the attending, who seemed to want to know why, twelve hours after he’d first told me I needed to improve a point of technique, it still hadn’t been corrected. (Saying, Sorry, right now I’m lucky to be standing up straight, and doing something at least functional with the instruments, can’t think straight enough to change habits right now, did not seem like a good idea.) (I sent the poor medical student to bed some time after midnight; he also seemed to find that irrational, but neither of us had enough energy to discuss it in detail.)

I got my fill of “continuity of care:” admit one patient, scribble some pre-admission orders (stat labs and induction immunosuppression) for the next one, run down and do the back-table on one kidney, go meet and examine the second patient, do the first case, write pre-admission orders for the third, back-table the second kidney, go check that the first one is still making urine, look at his chest x-ray, and continue. . . Then, the day after, even though the attending and I rounded before leaving the hospital, so I technically had handed over coverage of my patients to an on-call intern, neither I nor the nurses felt like leaving the intern in charge. If I didn’t wake up every hour to call and check on someone, they were paging me, or else had stumped the intern and he was calling to ask me. . . Eventually I gave up on sleeping and tried to get some chores done instead. I hate that feeling of waking up, and not being able to remember which nurse I had intended to talk to this time, or whether the fluid bolus I’m thinking about is something that has already happened, or that I still need to order. I keep intending to take a paper with me and write notes, but around the time that the difference between am and pm disappears, the coordination required to get a paper and pen in the same place also drops off. The significance of low urine output, however, sticks around.

It’s taken me 16 months of residency to find out what surgery as a profession is really like. I need to figure out who in the hospital has coffee available at midnight before trying that one again. Otherwise, give it another day or two, and I’m up for it.