Wednesday, August 01, 2007

In the Zone

Maybe it was the phase of the moon. Or maybe it was the fact that my day on call followed Simon's, and in comparison anyone would look good. But I was on today. By "today" of course, I mean my last thirty hour shift, in which I only say down for about 10 minutes total, and never touched my call room bed.

But despite being crazy busy, and rather stressful at times, everything went well in general. I had to bag ventilate a patient for about an hour and a half (trading off with one of the nurses) but he survived while teaching me much more comfort with mechanical ventilators (and incidentally, which are the good respiratory techs in this hospital). I had to get an arterial line on another patient, and did it perfectly it on the first try. I had 30 minutes of free time at exactly the right stage of the night and managed to look up articles which may positively alter our therapy for two different patients. I looked like a superstar on rounds and the fellow and attending both complimented me on my work and my presentations.

Not that I'm complacent. I know how hard it was to keep myself moving for that long, and how much busier the night could have been. Still, good days should be enjoyed.

4 comments:

Matt Conner said...

Congratulations! I am sure there will be many tough calls where you don't do so well, so enjoy this one, buddy!

Doc's Girl said...

Good work! :) Just make sure you remember days like this on your bad days...

Steve Hayes said...

Look what you can find by joining MyBlogLog: other things amanzi: interesting thyroid. You might enjoy it! I just came across all these medical blogs and thought of you.

Nathan said...

Matthew and Doc's Girl - thanks. I'm going to try.

Steve - I actually have a MyBlogLog account, but I find that it's too much bother to log in, and that I don't have the spare time to peruse it much anyway. Thank you for the link though, and I may revisit the site sometime.