The Worst Day of my Entire Life...

Yesterday was the worst day of my life so far.

And that's not an exaggeration.

After spending 2 weeks down in the psych dungeon playing with people's minds, I was rostered on to work on Sunday.

8am till 4pm... just me and the entire hospital to look after.

I was a little apprehenive the night before because little does anyone know that I had never actually successfully put a cannulae into a patient (I kid ye not!), but my intern buddies assured me it would be a breeze.

So naively I met the night RMO for handover and it didn't sound that bad... he ran out the door as fast as possible and about 3 minutes later my pager started beeping "MET CALL LEVEL 7 ..."

I don't actually rememeber how long it took me to get there... I just remember panic setting in... adrenaline coursing thru my veins... worse case scenarios popping into my head... those pearls of wisdom from med school reverberating to "Take your own pulse first"...

I arrived on the ward to find a clot of nurses (I have decided that the best collective noun for nurses in an emergency setting is a 'clot') hovering around looking at me saying "What do you want us to do Doctor?"

Turning around to look for this doctor, I sinking feeling came over me as I realised that I was the doctor and was supposed to do something.

Asked the nurses what was wrong and they gave me some rubbishy story abou the patient being non-rousable and having a distended abdomen a few days post-op from a car trauma... my worst nightmare from med school vivas started to dawn on me... internal abdo bleeding on a weekend with no radiology around!

More out of panic than systematic methodology, I fumbled in my bag for my torch and checked her pupillary reflexes and then suddenly the ICU resident came flying into the room with the crash cart to bail me out... thank God she came when she did or I was stuck for what to do next!

The medical reg (who is supposed to come to these Met Calls) rocked up 30 minutes later because she had slept in (having had 2 hours sleep the night before - did I mention that our working hours are illegal here!) and we worked out that this girl was not gonna die.

In the meantime, my pager had been beeping non-stop during the entire emergency; the cries of ignorant nurses asking me to chart non-urgent medications whilst I was trying to sort out life-threatening stuff... grrr!

So after making sure this girl was ok, I trudged off to see a sick patient on another ward... when I arrived the nurse told me "Oh yeah... this guys blood pressure is 50/30"

WHAT!!!

That sinking feeling began to kick in again and I instinctively said "More fluids" out of viva-brain-washing (thankyou St. George) and began to sweat profusely.

Called the registrar, more out of desperation than anything, and she agreed to 'come and see him' when she had some time... fat lot of good that'd be!

So I asked the nurse to puch 2 more 500mL bags of gel stat and told her the reg was coming.

I nicked off to sort out some other patients and it was only another 10 minutes before the pager started going off "Met Call Level 6"... the level that the 50/30 BP guy was on!

I ran up the stair as fast as my legs would go (gotta love Nike's!) and arrived to find that the nurse had called a Met Call on the low BP guy cos he was unrecordable. Pumped him with more fluids... did a X-match and ran off blood Cx. Reg showed up within 5 minutes this time... he decided today wasn't the day to die and came back to us so we all breathed a sigh of relief (and me especially cos I didn't wanna fill in a death certificate)... found out he was an immunocompromised patient who was septic with a cavitating lung lesion and had been getting 5 types of anti-microbials... and apparently he had been this septic for over 24 hours and no one had decided to do much about it... grrr!

So after I had wasted a few hours doing Met Calls I finally got back to the wards to find my whiteboards filled with jobs to do and my pager loaded with irrate messaged fomr nurses wanting me urgently...

Now in med school we are taught that we should check a patients EUC's and fluid input/output and carefully chart fluids in accordance with a physiological requirement for electrolytes...

Yesterday I just looked at what the previous doctor had ordered and repeated it... (please do not try this at home... it was a very dangerous thing to do and I shouldn't have done it)

I was being 'beeped' non-stop.. had no time to think about the decisions I was making... I was on autopilot but had no idea what I was doing... I no longer became an exercise in patient survival... it became an exercise in MY survival.

One of the nurses looked at my badge and said "Oh we have another Dr J in this hospital... we call him him 'God'... what would you like to be called... 'Jesus'?"

I wish Jesus could have come back yesterday!

Burnt out I trudged down to handover to the evening RMO then walked home to the empty house (all the other 'terns had nicked off to the beach) and cried... yes I cried... it was awful... it was one of the most terrifying days of my life... and I wanted to quit...

I called Mum and Dad and chatted to them for a bit... then went to church... thank God for church... amidst all the awfulness of my day I could still thank God for everything he's done for me... and be encouraged by complete strangers who are my brothers and sisters in Christ...

Today was a new day... I went back to the dungeon and was happy to be in the mad house... happy to be doing nothing and having only 25 patients to worry about today. I had time to chat to my reg (who is quite nice) and take a long lunch break (I didn't pee or drink or eat for 8 hours straight during yesterday's shift)... I will find pleasure in the simple things in life... for in the end... life isn't about work... we are not put here to live in order to work.... but to work in order to live.

There is more to life than this...