pathnew said:
Any stories (true, that is) of killer call in Path?
I suppose autopsy could keep you busy but I doubt you'd be up all night hurrying to finish reports, right?
Since I'm a more 'mature' candidate, I'm a little shy of very rough call. But it seems most residencies have call 1 wk at a time, which leads me to think it's unlikely to include a huge amt of sleep deprivation. (I can fall asleep 5min after the phone call is over). I don't mind being nickeled and dimed to death all night, going in, or even all-nighters; I was just dissuaded from Rads/Surgery by witnessing the all-night urgency and pressure fog that enveloped them.
Just exploring my options.
Thanks.
I've never had to pull off an all-nighter for pathology call. Here, we don't do calls for a week at a time.
For me so far, call has entailed weekend frozen section call, which hasn't been all that bad with respect to doing frozen sections. Instead, I will spend the weekend cutting in weekend specimens which hasn't been bad so far. But I have heard of stories from other residents who got "slammed" on weekend surgical pathology.
Other than that, we get assigned to weekend autopsy call. If we're "first up" for autopsy, that means we get the first two. If you're "second up" for autopsy on the weekend, you get the third. My worst call was autopsy call. It was the first Sunday I was on autopsy call and I got two autopsies that day. Ended up finishing the dissections around 7 pm. Since, we present autopsies at Gross Conference on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 8 am, that meant that I had to write up my Provisional Anatomic Diagnosis writeups (which basically entails describing gross findings and integrating them in addition to clinical information to assigning a provisional cause of death) that night. I ended up writing them in the luxury of my own office at home and finished them around 11 pm (since back then, it would take me forever to write one PAD). I got around 7 hours of sleep and had to present the next morning...and it was bad since with respect to a few gross findings, I got the two patients mixed up
Since then, I've been pretty fortunate. The thing about pathology is that even though you may work long hours in a given day, your hours are quite regular. On surgical pathology, when I cut I usually finish by 6 pm since that is the deadline for getting all the sections submitted to the processor. Then I get dinner and unwind a bit, chat with a few other residents about how cutting sucks ass, and start previewing around 7 pm. I don't like to stay past 10 pm since eventually, I'll just say "f*ck it" and go home. There have been a few days when I do have to preview until midnight but that's mainly my own fault since in the evenings, I tend to be more distractable and hence, more inefficient. But if you stay on top of things, it should be Ay OK!
As for frozen section call, when we're on "elective" rotations (such as DermPath or Cytology) we do have a night of call where you are on frozen duty from 5 pm until 8 am the next day. Second years take more night call (but again, one maybe two days at most in a given week) since they do less weeks of surgicals and their schedules overall are more accomodating. So it's OK for the most part as things tend to be balanced here. Technically, during overnight frozen call, you could get called in on a frozen anytime at night but the surgeons will usually page us into the hospital during the night if the frozen section diagnosis will be pivotal for the next step of surgical management. And we get around an hour of advance notice if that happens since it takes a while for us to get into the hospital and for us to arrange for the attending to get his/her ass into the hospital. So, overall, it isn't that bad. It sure beats getting paged at the middle of the night because your patient's blood sugar went up or had a VTach episode. Path call can be a bitch sometimes but clinical overnight call is much less predictable than overnight path call.
