So this morning I'm coming on to a 24 hour shift for family practice
OB, so I'm just going to get handover and then we'll go around
to see patients and see if there is anybody in active labour. The first two are L&D
um, the first one gave birth yesterday at, well, today actually
at three am. I may not sleep for the next 24 hours. Sometimes I get a little bit of a
nap in the afternoon if it's quiet.
So Sunnybrook has been really really nice and they
let me take on extra calls, so I do a shift a month
so I just fly in to
help out and the women's residents are really happy about that because
not a lot of people are actually interested in obstetrics.
It's pretty awesome. The first part of our day on call is we round
on the patients that are on the floor. She's the one
that was admitted with pre-term labour. Right, she's 28 weeks.
A couple patients aren't actually admitted under us, they are admitted under the high-risk
obstetrical group, but we still want to keep that continuity of care and we want people
to feel like we are actually taking care of them and actively involved with them,
regardless if they are under our service or not, so we went and we offered just some supportive care to see how
they are doing. As long as your baby is there you can be there too.
Having the senior medical students with you allows you to
give them some teaching and then they can
help you out too, so if it's a busy day on call they can do some of the consults
Ya, that's why I go for bi-weekly manicures. Nice!
Pretty much the most important thing you are looking for in the second baby check
are things that change, so if there was a previously closed pallette, that's not going to change.
So between 5 and 7 we see clinic patients, but otherwise
I can finish up any stuff I have in my clinic downstairs, I can do some
work on my academic project or just have a nap.
If it's not busy in the afternoon, I tend to get a nap because overnight
is typically when we see a lot of the volume, but it may be a quiet day
and you should never say the Q word on the ward so I've just screwed us over now
and we'll be crazy busy.
On the labour and delivery floor, there is never really a typical day, so we can go from having
absolutely no patients to being completely swamped and having 5 people in labour
at the same time. But typically, around 5 o'clock we'll have a
clinic and then
we see what happens from there.
So I'm just finishing
my 24-hour shift for family practice OB,
and it was quite unusual the 24-hour shift because I actually had no deliveries
or patients in labour. I only had one call into triage and that was actually
at 3 in the afternoon.
To prepare for a 24-hour shift, the best thing you can do is get a good night's sleep the day before.
Sometimes it's difficult to do that, but that will be the thing that keeps you going.
You find the little things that keep you awake and energized.
Adrenaline is the big things that does it, but then there are things like
green tea, cupcakes, coffee. I like to bring my
own big fluffy blanket because I find it gets really cold at night
and it's a little piece of home too, because when you sleep away from home, it can be a bit uncomfortable.
I love delivering, it's so much fun. It can be
really quiet or it can be crazy and you want to pull your hair out and that's part of the appeal
for me, and usually a happy time for people so you're helping them
through that which is great.