Night Calls...

The bane of every junior doctors.

Each of us are scheduled to do a few every month. As the day of the call approaches, the morale of that doctor will sink to rock bottom. In movies, the doctors on-call can go about their lives, going pak tor until their pager beeps. In reality, the doctors have to stay in the hospital and wait for things to happen (by Murphy's law, shit always happens). This means that the night before a call, he/she has to sleep early (means cannot go cheong until 3am.) Will be stuck in the hospital the day itself and still cannot go cheong the next day! (usually no sleep on call day so the next day shack like hell). That's 3 days in a row cannot cheong!!!

What do we do when we are on call? We take care of all the patients under our department. Every little shit thing that happens, we handle.

Nurse: Doc, patient in bed 8 has a fever, patient in bed 19 has not passed urine since he slept, and patient in bed 20 complain of pain.
Doc: What's the temperature of patient in bed 8?
Nurse: 37.6 deg celsius
Doc goes see the temperature charts... Bed 8 has been having fever for the past 3 days. It is coming down. (Doh!)
Bed 19 has not passed urine since he slept. Obviously what.. who pees in his sleep??? So should I wake him up to pee??
Bed 20 has pain. But where? Head pain, stomach pain or backside pain? Can't the nurse get more information before alerting the doc? Like that, must as well, give all patients our pager number and get them to call us directly. At least like that we can get more information.

Worse still. At 3am in the morning, after a 20hr shift of running up and down the wards. We get called to see a patient.
Patient: Lohkun arh.. Pak tor tia. Sah jik bo pang sai liao arh (Doctor, stomachache. 3 days never pass motion already)
3 days never pass motion, dunno how to tell the day doctor. Must wait until 3am at night then tell doc. But then again, thinking back, these were usually old ladies who had difficulties sleeping and they justed wanted someone to talk to.

These are just the minor things that happen in the night. For the major things that happen at night, wait for the next issue... (To be continued)