Instead of trying to remember everything from the past week and only really focusing on the last few days, I thought I’d write a little snippet on my phone most days and give you a more “in the moment” taste of things. Let me know which version you prefer.
09-08-2022
First time trying this format where I write a little snippet for the newsletter each day. Might capture more of the nuance than just straight out summary at the end of the week!
11-08-2022
Morning coffee in progress and some work things to do from home in a little while. It’s not even 3 weeks til I’m on leave for a whole month! Last minute bookings and detail planning is making it much more real and exciting.
Less exciting: I’m on call today âšī¸
12-08-2022
The on call last night wasn’t bad. Still don’t sleep well everytime I’m on call. How many years of this has it been now? Had a groggy morning of doing some emails etc and now am doing a list in a private hospital with a friend.
Found out I won 2 competitions! One is for a discount voucher on the Samsung Store. The other one is more exciting: I won a portable projector!!
I’m quite excited to try it out when it arrives!
13-08-2022
Ok… I REALLY don’t want to be at work today. It is the last on call I’m doing at this particular private hospital though (regularly anyway) they asked me to cover the full 24 hours but I might be flying tomorrow so I offered to cover til midnight. Was still dragging my feet getting here đ
The theatre pharmacist at work is normally very energetic and happy. K saw him a few days ago and he looks like he’s just dead tired and worn out. Wonder if that’s how I appear to everyone too?
Ahh well. Two more weeks!
14-08-2022
I’m glad this is the last regular on call I’m doing at this place. Not because it’s bad, but I’m just seriously tired. It’s 3am. I’m wired with adrenaline because about 20mins after I got home around 09:30pm, I got an early heads up about a pretty unwell patient.
The patient WAS very unwell. They essentially had a hole in their bowel a week prior and possibly had developed another. In addition, there was a whole bunch of other medical issues going on. Last time, they ended up in the intensive care unit and I struggled to get any intravenous cannula or arterial line to monitor them appropriately. Given the patient’s distress, I decided to put in an extra cannula and proceed to a very gentle induction: I’d do all the lines after they were asleep.
Drugs go in, patient falls asleep, breathing tube goes in. At this stage, I notice that the skin around the cannula is starting to swell – basically the cannula dislodged, but not before the patient went off to sleep. Even with such a low dose of anaesthetic, the blood pressure dropped to something dangerously low. The other cannula also stopped working. It was literally these terrible situations that get used in anaesthetic exams that you sit and think must be made up but here we were!
People started to get ready for the surgery but I had to keep them away to be ready for CPR. Thankfully, some intramuscular Ephedrine kept the blood pressure up. The surgeon walked in and realised we were in trouble and successfully got an IV in while we got adrenaline ready in case of an arrest.
Things slowly settled down after that – well as settled as can be for a patient who had not one but THREE spots of potentially dead bowel. It was not the sort of thing you want to be doing after midnight, especially after a 14 hour long day…
Anyway, the patient is safely in ICU. I’m tired. But still too full of adrenaline to go to sleep. I’m just glad that’s over.