So, we went back in November, despite Jeremy’s concerns that I would hate it the second time around. While walking 20 miles through the city, we found lots of things that both surprised and excited us…..they are as follows….

People actually push babies around in strollers in frigid weather!

There are true Southerners in the Clemson alumni group…and of course we all know someone who knows someone (we are from S.C. after all!).

The “El” has “pretend” heaters…who knew?!? We were very excited about them until we found out they sucked!

We used hand sanitizer more than ever!

It seems every time we visit (which has only been twice) there is abnormally warm weather, which gives us a very misconstrued idea of what life will be like there!

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We capped with 10 team admissions a little after midnight–so it was a busy admission afternoon/evening and not so much a busy early morning for admissions. I admitted three patients and a fourth went straight to the ICU which counted towards our cap meaning little to no work on our part. The other intern admitted four patients and our fourth year “acting intern” admitted two. The upper level resident supervises all the admissions so we can say he admitted 10.

There were three code pages throughout the day, but two were canceled quickly because the MICU doesn’t like to announce codes–they deal with them internally. The final code came at about 4:30 AM–from Radiology. Oops. When I got there it was merely a respiratory code. The patient was tubed and shipped back up to the floor.

But the main problem with call is the “cross cover”. I fielded phone calls all day and night on patient’s I’d never met. I ordered some Phenergan. I gave a patient a bit of morphine. I sent off a couple of blood cultures. I even wrote a work excuse for a patient’s husband.

In all I worked 29 hours and slept a mere 2 of those.

Welcome to residency.

I managed to find myself as the first physician present in a code situation today.

Talk about terrifying.

The nurses were performing chest compressions and giving bagged breaths for a patient this morning by the time I walked into the room.

I simply stood at the foot of the bed with a deer in headlights look and asked, “What’s going on?”

After an initial smart-assed response of, “Well, he’s not breathing”, I managed to get a bit of an event progression from the nurse who was already drawing up some epinephrine into a syringe.

Lucky for me…and the patient…a few more white coats with more experience arrived just as the nurse was finishing the history. I was off the hook for “leading” the code–and the patient was better off for it.

Of course, I broke the number one rule of code situations…

I forgot to take my own pulse.

What a morning.

*Editorial Note: On Friday I carried the code pager for the day, and it did go off. I was half way across the hospital and by the time I got there the code was finished. Apparently the patient was a DNR–or some such. As such I don’t count that as the first code of my career.