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.

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.

The definition of eternity is the time between midnight and five AM. If you look hard enough you can almost see the clock hands moving backwards and no matter what you do, it’s always just a little after one. In fact, it will be one AM for hours. Your brain will cry for sleep and you will be totally uninterested in the mundane crap that fills a lot of your night. At the same time your most ferverent wish will be that it’s all mundane crap. No two ways around it, call, like most of intern year blows with the power of a thousand hurricanes.

Is it that close to July 1st already?