Post-call Haze

This morning I finished my second-to-last call-shift of all medical school. That's right: I worked 25 hours solid, beyond the point where studies have shown I shouldn't legally be driving anymore, taking care of some of Calgary's sickest patients. From whence does this ancient and venerable practice spring? From the shores of Styx, my friend.

It's actually OK - I shouldn't complain, seeing as the senior Residents on the service routinely put in between 26 and 28 hour shifts despite the fact that Alberta's residency contract that says that our max is 24 hours.

The call shift actually isn't all that bad. You enter a strange night-time world that few see. I can't describe how I start to feel after about 7PM, and everyone else has gone home. Maybe it could get addicting - you start to feel like the last defender of a fortress... Throughout the hospital there are skeleton crews just like yours carrying out their own well defined jobs. I get to see patients in the ER at 2 in the morning because that's when they're suffering, and that's when they need us. In the caverns beneath the hospital (you didn't know about them?) there is a tiny room with a hospital bed, a lock on the door and a private attached washroom (luxury of luxuries in a giant public hospital) to which I can retreat and sleep exhausted in womb-like subterannean darkness before my trilling pager summons me to action again. It's a strange world, but one that I admit I enjoy seeing every once in a while.

And I don't mind it all that much because you always get your "post-call day" off. So for me, my girls don't know that I'm not home after about 7PM: to them, daddy just worked a long day the day before, and then got to stay home in his jammies to play with them all of the next. I trade a night, and some sleep, for a day home with my family. Which for me is a pretty fair trade.

And I get to be there when the things that I got into medicine to be there for happen. Last night a friend of mine passed-away. Someone for whom death appeared unexpected, unbidden, at a young age, for no reason anyone could see. It just happened. Sometimes I think of death on my unit like waves lapping the shore: sometimes the swell comes far,far up the beach, with no warning, and erases a name in the sand - utterly unpredictable. I was there to say whatever ridiculous words came to me. Words are never what count - it's the being there. And I was able to be there, with the people who had loved him, and just be a human being there, standing in awe at the way we can feel when things happen so utterly beyond our understanding. But stand as a living, breathing human, in the fire of memory and life. And speak a prayer for my brother crossing the ocean. As always, it's not my suffering to tell. But I witnessed it, and bear witness of the same.

In the dark hours before dawn. In the fortress on the beach.