Post Call.

I was on call yesterday in King Fahd Armed Forces Hospital.

Being on call means you should go to work (despite the fact that yesterday was Thursday: both a weekend and the first day of vacation). You don't only go to work, you go early (9:30 am), you sleep over -or try hard to- in a crappy room, then you go back the next day at aroun 11:30 am.
The on call scale in internal medicine consists of 2 interns, 2 residents, 1 senior registrar, and 1 consultant. Opposite to what logic may suggest, inerns work the hardest, and consultants work the least..
In KFAFH, there are 4 medical wards, madical ward 1, 2, 3, and the VIP ward. Yesterday I was in charge of med. ward 1 and the VIP.. IT wasn't bad actually, at least it was better than usual.. the on call team was mainly girls: both me and the other intern, and the 2 residents were girls, pretty ones i might add..
The exhausting thing about being on call is the anticipation of a call.. that tiny little gadget called pager is no tiny by any standards! It seems there's a mic, camera, infrared sensors that detect your every movement and send it to all nurses stations immediately! So whenever you sit down, or better yet lie down, you immediately get a page! It's like it's freakin magic or something!!! I would stay awake for 5 hours anticipating a call.. as soon as I give up to sleep and lie down for a sec the fireakin thing starts ringing!!
Now another call entity that should be described in detail is a nurse!
It's not an angel of mercy, with a beutiful face in a short white skirt and sexy boobs barely hidden beneath the tight white top, that's a playboy's nurse..
What we have is an evil nurse, another hybrid, that's rapidly multiplying and should be stopped..
This is a typical conversation:
My pager rings: 2229
So I should immediately pick up the phone and dial: 2 .. 2 .. 2 .. 9
nurse: hello, medical 1!
me: yes hello, I'm the medical on call, someone paged?
nurse: Oh oh (yes in philippino!), wait doctoraa (that's a female doctor lol)..
nurse: in philipino %$#^^$*^&%^$%^%&*^% (for almost 5 minutes)
then another nurse takes the phone: yes doctoraa.. I want to refer this patient, he doesn't want to eat.
me: that's precisely why I went to med school.. to convince people to eat!!!!
nurse: can I tell him the doctor said you must eat?
me: by all means!
nurse: thank you doctoraa.

15 minutes laters, the same nurse would page me again, to tell me the patient just ate!

Very fruitful being a doctor..

There's the other extreme though, when they page you to tell you that one of the patients is convulsing, lost consciousness, his blood pressure's falling, his breathing is irregular (all those sentences by the way are clues that the patient is dying!)..
I would just blink a couple of times before I would say: Ok, I'll call my senior.

You see, when you're on call, you follow the rule of the jungle.. Interns are the bottom of the food chain, we receive all kinds of threats, the ones that are above our knowledge (which is the case in 99% of the times), we refer to the one's above --> the residents.. they take it from there.. residents are heroes when it comes to interns, and are mess ups when it comes to registrars.. and so forth..

In conclusion: the ones that really RULE the hospital, are the evil nurses!