Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Call again!
It’s a funny thing, but I dread my 1 in 12 call more than I ever did my 100% call back in Crescent City. When you’re on call all the time, you come to forget about it. You know you can’t drink alcohol or leave town, but other than that, life goes on . . . until your phone rings, of course. Then things grind to a halt.
So y’all might think I’m not looking forward to Bakersfield, where I’ll be back on the 100% call schedule (or close to it — I’ll have one week and one weekend break from call per month until a second doc gets hired), but I really am. For one thing, I’ll be taking call from home. Because of the distances involved, I have to stay in a hotel when I take call for Walnut Creek. It’s kind of nice not having to make the commute, but I would still rather be home.
And I’m torn, as always, as to whether I want to get called in. See, I get paid if I go into the hospital, but if I don’t get called, I don’t earn any extra pay. I like an uninterrupted night’s sleep, but it’s also fun to earn some unexpected extra cash.
There’s a constant, low amplitude thrum of terror to call, too. Most every doctor must sense this, unless he’s in one of those non-life-or-death specialties like, I don’t know — are there any non-life-or-death specialties? Guess everyone has their own private nightmare scenarios. For me, it’s the fear that I won’t be able to perform up to the level required of me for some critical event.
Pager just went off. Business? Naw. Call from an advice nurse needing, um, advice.
My last call night, I slept straight through, drove into the office an hour early, and THEN the ER called with a couple of cases. They think they’re doing me a favor when they do that, but they’re not. (Hey guys? Call me at 6, not 7:30. I don’t mind. Really!) Because then I have to rush around to get things done before my patients start rolling in at 8:30. I hate rushing around!
Wish me luck . . .
D.
Do opthalmologists have life or death situations?
My brother’s sight was saved by an ophthalmologist who was on call at the ER where my brother was taken after an accident where a stick pierced and got stuck smack dab in his eyeball. There are some pretty scary operations that opthalmologists perform, like this one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitrectomy that my brother had to have a few years as a result of complications years after his original accident.
Hmm. Ocular melanoma and retinoblastoma come to mind, but neither would qualify as an emergency. Ophthos come in emergently for trauma to the eye, but that’s hardly a life-or-death situation. Periorbital abscesses . . . well, we ENTs usually get called before ophtho on those.
Lucie: I don’t know how those guys operate on eyes. Gives me the creeps to even think about it.
always side with getting paid folk
When I was overseas we used to have the equivalent of call. If the office was big, it wasn’t that often. If it was small, well, one could be one call every six weeks. That 3 a.m. phone call – usually not good, although occasionally it would be someone who hadn’t figured the time change right. Sometimes someone was dead. Sometimes someone had to go pick up a crucial communication. Sometimes it was a prank caller, which provoked a lecture that this number was for emergencies only. Well, maybe some people would consider trying to find a friend from childhood who left the country years ago and never got in touch an emergency. Yet another cautionary tale in the war against drunk dialing.