Working Nine to Five - or not even close.

Ok, so I promised to blog the weekend before last and didn't. The main reason for this is that we now have 4 dead laptops in our house (don't ask what we do to them - I've no idea). Anyway, we've just got a desktop courtesy of missbliss's parents (thank you :))  Of course there is also the other matter of being quite busy. This whole working thing is rather annoying, most of the time I'm only supposed to work 8 hour days, at least that's what the hospital would like to think (naturally we are EWTD compliant). This makes life difficult enough, especially when you consider I've not done an 8hr day yet! When the bloody hell are you supposed to go to the bank when you have a job? When are you supposed to go and spend your hard earned cash? I barely have enough time to wee during the day let alone leave the hospital! I don't mind being busy as it makes the time go quickly but I could do with a 4 day week just so that I can do everything I need to do outside of work. 24hr Manchester had its advantages in that respect. This makes time for blogging a little short - but now we have a computer which hopefully will work for more than 2 days, it should be easier!

I've just finished what should have been 12 days straight, actually I had friday off so it was infact only 11 days. My day off wasn't much of a holiday though, apart from a yuppie-esque lunch in town with missbliss who was working, I spent all day catching up on real-life admin - bore. It was my first weekend 'on call' (basically ward cover for about 200-300 patients) last weekend and it was genuinely the most stressful weekend of my entire life. Not in a oh my god I can't do this way but in a holy shit what the hell is going on way. The fact I had some really great senior staff probably prevented me from the complete emotional collapse that some of my colleagues have had. I can safely say that it isn't fun when someone is effectively bleeding half of their circulating volume out through their rectum right in front of you. Overall, apart from the fact it was a weekend, I quite enjoyed myself - although I'm not rushing to do another one! The responsibility is bloody scary but at the same time quite exhilarating, the chance to see and do some acute medicine is refreshing compared to my usually quite stable ward patients. 

Inevitably, with independence and lack of experience come mistakes - I don't know whether or not I've made any yet, particularly as I rarely see again the patients I see when on ward cover. The hardest thing about being on cover is prioritising things, that is the key. In fact, the same can be said for the whole of medicine. When your bleep is going off every 5 minutes, not only do you have to be organised but you also have to have a way of triaging things in your head. Some jobs can be done in minutes but complex and ill patients can take hours. Am I supposed to run off and answer my bleep every time I'm in the middle of something? It might be polite, but it is completely impractical. For me this was one of the hardest things to get used to, although sometimes I regret answering - for example when switchboard have for some reason given my bleep to a very persistent job-seeking cleaner, seriously, like I don't have more important things to worry about!

P.S - when sorting through our music on our shiny (old) desktop I discovered missbliss has no fewer than 9 copies of Dolly Parton's, Working 9 to 5.