A Little Rest for the Weary

Happy Monday! For me it is a tired monday morning. I finished a long, very busy night shift. Now I'm fixin' to get myself some shut eye! How does that sound, ya'll? The good news is that another week is down - 5 down, 22 to go until I am back in the beautiful southern city of Charleston. The better news is the all of my patients from last night are doing fine. We had a couple guys banged up pretty good, but all will be okay.

Mental fatigue is setting in for me. Everyone at the hospital is working more than at home. Most people are working quite a bit more including myself. Gone are the days of carefree weekends. There are no weekends here. The casualties keep coming. There are no days off. I'm not exaggerating. Most of us do not have any days off for 6 monhts. We have to be ready 24/7. That's exhausting to think about.

My challenge is the daily early wake up call. I am at the hospital no later than 6 seeing my patients. Or, if I am working nights I will start a new day around 0530. I have to be ready to have a plan for all my patients by 0630 when the entire professional staff gets together for rounds. It's hard to be coherent at that hour much less have a game face on ready to go. It has to be this way so that the surgeons can get started early on their surgeries. This is how the surgery world works. I prefer a kinder, gentler work schedule but that will not happen here. It is what it is.

There are people that have a more challenging workload than me. We have only one eye surgeon, thus, he is on call 24/7 for 6 months in a row. That's painful to think about to say the least. We have just 2 radiologists, therefore, they each work 12 hours a day every day. Our chief of the medical staff makes the call on what patients we will take at our hospital from outside places. Thus, he is busy almost all of the time. I could go on and on with examples. The bottom line is that we are working as hard as we can. We have to do it because our troops need us.

Lights out for me...