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bipolarinmygenes 
Sunday, Nov. 8, 2009
Back to work tonight after a few days off. It's always hard to go back to work after having several off. I think it's especially hard since the last night I worked was a bad night. It didn't start out so bad, but went there in a hurry.
It all started with me calling an on-call physician to request a stronger pain med for my patient since her pain was out of control. Apparently, the physician was ticked off because of something that happened earlier in the day. So instead of listening to me as a professional, she was rude and would not help the patient. She complained to me how I called her on her home phone and how this woke up her children. (I didn't call her on her home phone anyway, I only called the communication center and they called her). If she gets phone calls to her home and not her cell, then she needs to straighten it out with the Comm. Center, not get rude to me about it. And...she is a doctor...Hello, isn't that a part of being "on-call"? Anyway, I apologized to her, but she really wouldn't listen to me. She just passed it on to anesthesia saying that in the first 24hrs, Anesthesia had to take care of it. Never mind that it was 22 hrs post op. She basically told me that since anesthesia was rude to her earleir that day, then "two can play that game". I told her that she was putting the patient and I in the middle and that the patient is the one going to suffer for it. She said, "well, I'm going to stick to my guns"..."You'll have to call anesthesia". And when I did, all the anesthesiologist could do was put the patient back on IV pain meds. After consulting with my supervisor about my desire to call the House Officer on this, she said it would do no good. So instead, I talked it over with the patient. We agreed that I would give her a combination of meds: 2 Darvocet, 2 Simethicon, and 2 Benedryl. If that didn't work, I could then bump her up to a different medication based on standing orders (if the Darvocet did not control pain, etc after two dosages). It's just unfortunate that the patient had to go through this when the doctor could have given the go ahead and the patient could have gotten treated immediately. I did end up writing an incident report due to the doctor not giving an order when needed. And the rationale being that she was angry with the Anesthesia Dept and wanted to retalliate. So, hopefully this won't happen again. And hopefully, tonight will be a better night than before. I wish I would have known what to say to get her to write the order in the first place. Well, this was a learning experience for me. I'm growing from it, and growing thicker skin.
