Night Float

What can I say - I've been on it this month and it sucks. Let me count all the reasons why:

1. You're taking care of 12 interns (plus or minus some medical students) worth of patients at night, which is up to 120 patients. All the little (and big) crap that interns normally get called about during the day gets funneled through to night float. Depending on the intern, sometimes they don't do a very good job of taking care of issues before they leave for the day, so then you have to deal with it at night.

2. You're exhausted. At Pennsylvania Hospital, we work from about 5pm until 7:30am for an average of 3.5 days a week. If you say that's about 15 hours a day, that averages 52 hours a week, which isn't bad, but the timing is horrible. Usually we work 3-4 days in a row. For those days, I usually get home around 8 or 8:30am, shower, maybe get something to eat. I finally get to sleep around 9 or 9:30am, and then get some bad sleep before getting up at 4pm again to go to work - even if I sleep the whole time (usually I waken quite a few times, sometimes for more food), that's barely 7 hours of sleep, and it's never good sleep.

3. You feel very isolated and you never seen anyone. You're completely time-shifted and if you live or have a significant other, you often leave for work before they get home, and you often get home after they've already left for work. So if you work a number days in a row, you might not see them for quite a while. Moreover, you work during the nights half the time, and the other half the time, you're exhausted or recovering from working multiple days in a row, so you never see your friends since they all get together during the evenings. You don't even see your colleagues much - you see most of them for signout when you get there and before you leave. You really only see a couple of people throughout the night, many of whom are also busy. So you spend much of the time alone - it's very isolating.

4. Nighttime is generally a bad time for patients - for whatever reason, if patients start to deteriorate, they often do it at night, so you deal with a lot more critical issues and patients whose hearts may stop beating or who stop breathing. There are many fewer doctors and nurses around at night, so you have less help and have to make many more crucial decisions on your own, which can be daunting at times.

5. The food is horrible. I basically eat cafeteria food around the clock when I'm working, so I usually get cafeteria food only for 3 or 4 days in a row. It's horrible. Although one saving grace is the pancakes on the weekends. Sometimes residents will order out, but unless they take care of it, I often don't have time. Plus that costs a lot of money, so I don't want to do that too often.

One more week to go.