Do not go together.
-Unless you count sleeping while being IN surgery, which I have become fairly good at. I've nodded off a dangerous number of times while retracting, feeling myself drifting forward and then snapping back, forward then snapping back. This continues until something minorly exciting happens in the surgery -- like unexpected blood. The patient's loss is my gain. Haven't fallen INTO the patient being operated on yet, thank goodness.
-Unless you count sleeping during morning conferences. M&M conference, grand rounds, and residents' teaching conference all provide perfect opportunities for putting your head on your hand and trying to get some snoozing in.
-Unless you count the nauseating post-call crashing you can count on every fourth day. After a few (not restful) hours of sleep in the call room, I come home and crash for a few more hours. I wake up feeling completely dehydrated, completely disgusting, wanting to vomit, and not at all rested.
However, I have gotten quite good at sleeping completely soundly, being dead to the world around me and sleeping through any and all events going on around me. Eric leaves for work on a post-call morning? I can barely remember him kissing me goodbye. The phone rings, or a text message is received, and the phone beeps every three minutes thereafter to notify me of the missed message? Sleep right through it. The cats crawl all over me begging to be fed? Completely unaware. It's a good thing I don't have a baby. That poor thing would probably starve in poopy diapers every fourth morning.
It's a shame, because in college I developed a very useful skill: to be able to sleep soundly and peacefully, but wake up instantaneously if the phone rang or there was a knock on the door. It's a good skill for RAs and parents to have. It seems I have now lost it.
But guess what! I am SOOOO close to being done with surgery! I was on call last night, post-call today, and tomorrow they actually gave us the day off because we have our final written exam on Friday. On Saturday and Sunday I have to go into the hospital for the mornings only (totally bearable), and then next week I'm working at a private practice ENT for the week. So unless there are any unexpected surgeries this Saturday, I am DONE!!!!!!! You have no idea how happy I am about that. It was totally worth having to stay up until 1:30 this morning and now feeling completely ill despite the additional 4 hours of sleep once I got home.
And you know, it's really not that I don't like surgery; I do. Love the OR. But I HATE the way I now feel every day: cranky, bitchy, and bitter. Eating McDonald's once, if not twice, each day, because it's the only thing available. Feeling dehydrated and edematous (ring is fitting a little TOO snuggly these days) and completely un-pretty. Thank goodness it's almost over.
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Is it miserable like that because you're a student on rotation, or would it be like that once you're a resident? Because yikes, that sounds like a fairly miserable existence :/
Residency is much, much worse. As a student, I can't write orders or make decisions on patient care, so there are only a few things I can do (change dressings, pull drains, interview patients, collect lab data). The residents, on the other hand, are called about everything going on with every patient, and they have to respond. On days I'm not on call, we "only" have to work 12-hour shifts; we're released at 5 pm no matter what. The residents not on call have to stay until they are done afternoon rounding, which may not even start until 5 pm -- and they show up at 3:30 or 4 am, so they're working at least 15-hour days when they're not on call.
When the students are on call (every 4th night), we're usually sent to bed at a reasonable hour, sometime between 10:30 pm and 1:30 am, because there comes a point when we can't do anything more to help with what needs to be done and the interns are nice enough to send us to bed. So I'll sleep for a few hours, wake up by 5 am to round again, and be home around 8 am to go back to sleep. The interns/residents have to stay up, though, still responding to all those calls from the nurses for pain medicines, wacky lab values, and otherwise sick patients. So they usually stay up all night, since the "day" starts at 3:30 again anyway. So then they'll go home around 8 or 9 am and crash, coming in the next day at 4 again. Plus, there's usually only 2 or 3 of them sharing call, so they're on every 2nd or 3rd night instead of every 4th night.
It gets a little easier as you get further along in your residency, because you don't have to respond to the little, annoying stuff, but in some ways it gets worse, because each intern is only responsible for a share of the total patient load, whereas the chief is responsible for all the patients at all times.
Surgery is definitely the worst residency, by far, but all residencies suck. The 80-hour workweek that was put into place a few years ago is still a joke -- no surgery residency and most other residencies don't meet it. The interns report that they're only working 80 hours each week, but 80 is more like a minimum, and 100+ is more realistic. It's really depressing to think about and I have to just push it out of my mind right now or I'll go crazy. I'm having trouble watching Grey's Anatomy right now, because even though it in no way pretends to be portraying real medicine, it still bothers me to see how much free time they all have to worry about their annoying relationships. The interns I know don't even have time to run to the bookstore across the street to buy the books they need for Step 3 (the "intern" exam). After this rotation is over, I'll hopefully be able to go back to seeing Grey's for what it is -- entertainment -- and not a reality show.
The good news is, after surgery is done next week, the worst of my rotations (hours-wise) will be behind me. Pediatrics will be fairly intense when I am at the hospital because it will be the beginning of the winter/sick season, but the hours themselves won't be so horrible, and internal medicine (first thing in 2008) will be bad at times, but neither will be as time-consuming as OB or surgery, and then I just have psychiatry (easy!) and family medicine (office hours! even easier!) after that to finish off the year.
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