Recovering.

I'm now one week out from my most miserable week I've had through all my medical training. It was my first week of night float in radiology. When I was a medicine intern night float was painful, but I had upper level residents in house that I could call and chat with about sick patients, and they could come and look at anyone I was uncomfortable with. I also always had the option of asking the ICU to check out a patient that I thought was sick (yes, I know that everyone in the hospital is sick, but these people were really knocking-on-death's-door-sick).

Radiology night float is different. The shift starts at 9 pm. After 10 pm our staff radiologist on long call goes home and I am the only radiologist (and just in training) in the hospital. I have attendings who are at home, sleeping that I can call upon if I'm really not comfortable with a study, but for the most part it's me with a whopping 10 months of training under my belt.

Fortunately my week was rainy and the young kids were not out on their ATVs, so there weren't a lot of traumas (which are some of the more stress provoking situations because of the short time we have to find all the pertinent findings for the trauma surgeons who are breathing down your neck deciding if the patient needs emergent surgery), but it was still a busy enough week. There were several cases that I was contemplating calling in an attending, but I didn't. I spent the remainder of the night stewing over whether I had made the right call and finally in the morning (around 7:30 or 8 am) I would get smart people (my attendings) to either confirm or reject my preliminary report. For the most part I was right. Nobody who was sent home because of my preliminary report had to be called back into the hospital because of a major miss. Nobody went to the operating room because of an incorrect finding. No one had surgery held because of a major miss. So, for my first week of night float, success, kind of.