Geez, memories of intern year, endless rounding (I think sometimes the act of rounding is over justified....life could be made easier for medicine dudes if they'd just set their pt up initially with whatever is necessary (pneumonia:Abx, vaccine for future prevention, O2 prn,etc; severe COPD exacerbation: vent settings, meds, breathing Txs, sedation orders, nutrition, etc), check on 'em once a day, and fine tune stuff based on improvement and ancillary staff reports....most of the time patients in the hospital don't need to be rounded on, they need a little time for the plan to work...
endless scut work by young doctors doing crap they shouldnt have to do in order to get stuff done in an immortally inefficient academic system that employs ancillary staff that could give a rats ass, sleeping in a hospital on call for some unknown reason (how many private medicine/surgery dudes spend the night in the hospital on their call nite?), wasting an inordinate amount of time waiting for lab results/ancillary staff interventions like breathing Txs, ordered EKGs, Xrays, etc....getting up on your post call AM very early (after fielding phone calls all nite from RNs asking for s^it that is protocol in the non-academic world) in order to write notes that are meaningless in the patient's treatment scope, having to draw blood/transport the pt to CT yourself/run the blood to the lab yourself....etc etc etc because you realize very early that if you do the task yourself, no matter how menial, you'll get more sleep; going to required M&M/medicine conferences to listen to "experts" that are in academic medicine for a reason (personality flaws/laziness).....etc etc etc.....
I feel for you guys. Hang in there, and remember that your chosen profession holds better days than what you are experiencing now. Not all better days, but more better days than what most fleas experience.
