Last Night on Call

Welcome to your new job

Medical intern on call, please contact switchboard.

Five different EC doctors turned to look at me, standing over a patient in blue latex gloves, a needle poised in my hand. "Me?"

"You're the medical intern, aren't you?"

"Yes," I said.

"Then, you."

I scrambled to the phone and lifted the receiver, hesitating.

"Dial nine," the doctor alongside me said.

"Right, thanks," I said, dialing nine.

"Switchboard?" Came the bored voice.

"I'm the medical intern?" I said shakily.

"What's your number, doctor?"

"Oh, I don't have a speed dial yet. I'll give you my cell number."

A few minutes later my phone was ringing, Truecaller labeled it 'hospital'.

"Hello?" I answered.

"Doctor, we have a patient who has demised in the ward. Please will you come and certify them dead and fill in the death form."

Me? I think you have the wrong number. But okay.

Not too shy to tell you I had no idea how to certify someone dead before this day. I had studied death and the cessation of life, but I had to go and stand over a freshly deceased man and write a legal note that he had died and that felt worlds apart.

I'd seen dead bodies. I'd had to cut a dead body in medical school. But a dead man who was still warm, it's nothing I can fully express on a page of writing. I checked for pulses.. is that??! Oh no, that's just mine. Listened to the chest for the sound of a beating heart, the sound of breathing. None of the signs of life were present.

I picked up my cell to dial Belle. She had introduced herself about an hour earlier as the doctor who would be on call with me overnight. My babysitter, essentially. I had heard good things about her in my one day of my job - that she was nice. Well, I was at the most baby part of my learning to be a doctor here so I was hoping she was very, very patient. 

"Hi Belle. I'm certifying a patient dead and I just wanted to know... How do I do that? In the notes."

She ran my by what to write, essentially all the signs of life I had just checked for, and to ask the sisters to call the family. Before I could even get to that, my phone was ringing again. 

"Hello, doctor, I'm calling from ward 4. We have an aggressive patient here, a prisoner, and we need you to come and sedate him."

Once again the overwhelming feeling of: me?? You have the wrong number, I'm just the stu-

Oh. Right. I'm the doctor now. 

 "Belle, hi. I was just called to sedate... someone. What do you guys usually use? I'm used to using 2mg lorazepam."

"First go an see him, check he doesn't have any renal impairment. And find out a bit about the situation."

When I got to the ward, the sisters pointed me to the back. There sat a prison warden, outside the room, playing on his phone. I arrived at the room and he stood to walk in with me. The prisoner was chained to the bed, lying awkwardly with his head against the wall and his body skew on the bed. He had a bandage around his head, it was blood-tinged. 

"Hello, sir," I said to him.

"Hello," he mumbled.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

He began to mumble some things I couldn't understand, I heard 'pain' and 'I was cross'. He didn't look very aggressive when I spoke to him. I left the room and flicked through the notes - a prisoner brought into the hospital after an assault, suspected crush syndrome. Kidney function currently normalizing.

I called Belle. "No, that's a surgical patient, you don't have to write up anything. You can tell the surgical intern to do it and come back to EC." 

"Okay."

I had met the surgical intern earlier that day: a beautiful girl with dark smooth skin and an easy smile. Her name was Suri. I found her number on the group we had made for the new interns and dropped her a massage about him.

By the time I arrived back at the EC, it had been about two hours since my shift had begun. Two hours only. My head was swimming. I smiled at Belle and returned to the patient I was seeing when switchboard had called me earlier. I opened her file to carry on with the interview, when my phone rang again.

"Hello doctor. I'm calling from ward 5, we need a drip please."

I approached Belle and told her I needed to go up to the wards again. "Okay, no problem, call me if you need help with anything. I know it's a lot. You're doing well."

I smiled. "If I'm busy with a patient and I get called, what do I do about the patient?"

I was so, so sure she was going to say, 'I will see the patient'.

Instead, "Go and do what you need to do in the ward and then come back and finish seeing her."

Oh, right. Because I'm a doctor now, not just a student. 

My head was swimming as I climbed the stairs yet again. 

The man I was asked to drip had meningitis (an infection/inflammation of the delicate lining of the brain) and he was not 100% with me in reality. But he allowed me to insert the drip. Or, rather, to attempt to. Standing over him was like standing over a hot stove, and I huffed and puffed with needle after needle, but the drip would simply not work. 

I wallowed in self pity for a moment before I called Belle. "I am so sorry to bug you but I absolutely can't get this drip. I've tried like ten times."

"No worries! I'll come and help."

And wouldn't you know it, she got the drip first time.

I felt like a total flop - I was the doctor now. As a student one could raise their hands and say, 'well I tired, the real doctor will do the drip now', but I wasn't supposed to be there anymore. I was supposed to be the one who came to the rescue. 

"I'm so sorry," I said to Belle. "I feel terrible."

"Every day it will get easier," she smiled. "Now come and finish your patient in EC so we can go and rest."