Typical Day, part 1 of 2
August 17th, 2005Everyone always asks me what I do in the hospital. Here’s a description of my typical day, starting from when I get up in the morning.
The day technically does begin at 4:30 in the “morning”, even though the sky is even darker when I get up than when I went to bed. I then hang out in the shower for about 25 minutes; the first 20 minutes are spent standing still, trying to get the water to wake me up, even though the warmth of the water really just makes me sleepier; the last 5 minutes is when the actual cleaning business takes place. When I’m done with the shower and bathroom, I open the bathroom door to walk into the bedroom, only to be reverse-blinded. With my eyes used to the bright lights of the bathroom, and my room still dark because it’s essentially nighttime, I step out and see nothing but black. Just black. That sucks.
I then drive to the hospital, and it’s here where the only silver lining can be found. Even though I spend 90% of my time in this city stuck in parking lot-like traffic, 5:30am is a time that I can definitely expect no traffic on the freeway. None. Barely a car on the road. It’s so early that the metering lights are off…not just stuck on green, but off. Maybe I should rotate my schedule all year long to have such luck on the freeway.
I arrive at the hospital and start roaming the empty, cavernous hallways of the pediatrics floor…the only other people I see are some other med students and the few nurses that were stuck with the graveyard shift. Once I come to grips with how depressing the situation is, I start pre-rounding — checking up on my patients to see what happened since I left the previous day. And here comes the highlight of my day…because I go to each of my patients and wake them up from their sleep. These poor kids are waken up every 3 hours or so by the nurses to have vital signs checked, and I happen to pre-round on them right in between nurse visits. The moment they’ve managed to calm down after some stressful blood draws and to find a minute of silence in spite of the talking staff…I come along, shake them (and their parents) awake, and then proceed to annoy them by asking them, in broken Spanish, if they have diarrhea. I then poke them all around, asking “does this hurt” (still in Spanish) each time, and then finally leave them alone.
Don’t worry…we’ll see them again during rounds, which is where I’ll pick up next time.