It was Wednesday night last week that I had my first night of trauma call. Instead of my normal quota of one pager going off no less than once per day (usually with breaking news on our lecture schedule, but often to find my team or receive tasks), I was carrying a second: the trauma pager. It's not so much a pager to answer as it is an alert to begin making your way to the ER to admit an incoming trauma patient. I paged the resident on call for trauma service, and gave him my own personal pager number as well in case he needed to reach me for anything else. That was at 5 pm. It was almost 6 pm when I was paged and informed there was an in-house patient headed to the OR with an upper GI bleed. The surgical team was informed I would be on my way to help out, and I was to head to suite 15. I hung up and left the lounge to head towards the OR. I scrubbed before I walked into the OR suite, hat and mask in place as well, and was greeted by the scrub nurse who asked for my glove size...
Excerpts of a rural hospitalist's thoughts and experiences