Rumble in the jungle

I've hit the mid-term hump. Monday was one of those days that got such an ass-kicking that Tuesday was still rubbing it's rear wondering what happened. Wednesday is fearful for the morning and I think Thursday is willing itself into non-existence.

We took in many patients on the last weekend, and for the first time in our spoilt rosters our unit was faced with a list that stretched over a page.

The almost knee-jerk reaction from our superiors was to tell us to spend the first half of Monday trying to turf these patients to other units.

I didn't like coming to work and then solely working to make someone else's work harder, even if that someone is a registrar who likes to point out our unit's problems.

I was starting to see the dreariness of paper pushing that I had been fortunate to avoid with such a light patient load. By lunch I felt disconnected from my patients, even more so the ones that I had successfully disconnected my team from by turfing them off.

Tuesday started badly when I forgot my pager, lost the previous day's blood results and came to work to find out one of our patients hadn't had an important colonoscope. This gentleman came in with rectal bleeding. He has mechanical heart valves which mean his blood needs to be thinned somewhat so that it doesn't clog up the valves. We had stopped his blood-thinners so that he wouldn't continue to bleed. We wanted a colonoscope to investigate the bleeding as urgently as possible so we could restart his blood-thinners and prevent him from having a heart attack, a stroke or some other catastrophic event.

I spent this morning shaking my tin for pennies at the feet of the Colorectal and Gastroenterology teams who do the colonoscopes. As apologetic as they were, Charity was not forthcoming. My colleague spent the morning getting crap dumped on her by the Haematology team for not restarting the patient's blood-thinners, and then had to endure further crap-showers from our registrar for apparently taking the Haematologists too seriously.

Again, by lunch we were feeling disconnected, and about ready to rumble.

We decided to let the man have lunch. He had been fasted for two days in preparation for this test, which was looking like it might materialize in the next millenium.

At 1500hrs I get a call from the Colorectal registrar who tells me that three (count them, 3) patients didn't turn up (punks) and my patient could be seen straight away.

Crap. We had let him eat. Or had we? I called the ward.

"No, actually he hasn't had anything to eat yet." Hurrah! Out of the mess that was today, there might be something to celebrate yet. I struggled through the rest of the afternoon, looking forward to seeing the scope report, looking forward to telling the gentleman and his frustratingly anxious wife, "There's nothing to worry about, and you can (both) go home."

At 1700hrs, with a fair batch of menial tasks still left to do I hopped on down to ward 1E to read the report that would help power me through the last of my busywork...

"Bowel preparation was unsatisfactory. Clear to splenic flexure. Colon not fully visualized. Suggest repeat colonoscopy as outpatient."

God.

Damn.

It.