Legends of the Call

Why the blogging radio silence you may ask, faithful reader? Well, lemme tell ya....

I've been rotating on Cardiology, certainly a vital area for an emergency medicine doc to know a thing or two about. However, the census of patients more than doubled just before I came on-service, so it's been busy, busy, busy. I'm on q4 call, which means that every fourth day I'm on for 30 hours straight. It's a truism among doctors that call gets a lot harder once you pass 40, and I'm here to testify to the truth of that. Everybody wilts by the end of call, but I'm having a tough time keeping up with my much younger colleagues. Today is my only day off in a 12-day stretch, so I wanted to seize the opportunity for a quick post.

However, I'm off to the library now. Every month we take a standardized test that's compared with scores in other programs around the country and reported to our program director, and today's my only chance to study and take it before the end of the month. Not exactly what I'd prefer to be doing on my day off, but whaddya gonna do? Nobody said that being intern would be easy. Or humane.