Sleepless night.

Assalamualaikum and hello.

This post is overdue but I feel like writing anyway before I hit the sack.

I was oncall last week, working with the medical intern (let's name him SB) from 8pm-6am. I arrived around 7.30pm, changed into scrubs, and went to the doctors' room to meet SB. Another fellow medical intern oncall was there so we planned our 'route' for the night, delegating which wards to go etc. There were only two medical intern oncall per night, and trust me, the amount of workload divided between these two poor souls are beyond absurd.

SB was always busy attending patients and charting medications. So I was the one responsible to answer the bleeps. The moment I clipped it onto my pocket, it went off crazily, almost every minute.

"This is Nur, I'm calling on behalf of the medical intern on-call. Any help needed?" was my default answer everytime. And I would list down all the pending tasks for SB to prioritize.

It basically went like, "St James' ward- temperature spike", "St Luke's ward- need cannula for antibiotics", "St Paul's- patient is confused and verbally abusive."

It went on and on and on the whole night, probably with a few pauses for a drink to prevent us from dehydrating.

On one instance, SB was handling a catheter when the bleep went off. I picked up and it says, "Doctor, this patient in ward X has vomited three times, could you please come down to chart for antiemetics (anti-vomit drugs)?"

"Ok we'll try our best and reach you shortly thanks" was my answer, although I knew very well that we wouldn't make it anytime soon as there were other patients who needed urgent review.

We went off to see other patients when the bleep rang again. I answered, and it was the same nurse who called regarding the vomiting gentleman. "I bleeped you earlier, this patient is vomiting now we need to give him something, come down, right now!" And she hang up without a word, sounding pretty annoyed, which is totally understandable as she was worried.

That was basically the whole night, annoyed carers or nurses who needed urgent help but we couldn't do much as our hands were full all the time. I can see how hard SB was working to fulfill everyone's demand. We kept saying sorry on the bleeps to let them know we're not ignoring their requests.

Imagine at 4am in the morning, a bleep came with regards to a patient who had severe headache. We went to see her and SB did a full neuro exam (poking the upper and lower limbs etc), to which the patient irritably replied, "Doctor, is this really necessary? I only have a headache."

huhu. Penat + sangat menguji kesabaran. Also shows how much good deeds you can gain if every intention to help people were set right. It was a really good experience, I definitely learned a lot.

p/s: My first cannulation on an old lady with poor intravenous access at 3am in the morning went unexpectedly well, here's to many more successful cannulation! #lol