This past week was one of those weeks looming ahead of me that I was already dreading as I entered into it. I was to be working through another holiday and following a string of nights, and I would have a quick turnaround into a mid-shift. As a nocturnist by choice, I rarely work mornings or mid-shifts. I find the nights busy but also less intrusive — i.e., less administrative personnel around which allows us to have a bit more freedom. We have our own ebb and flow at nights, usually extremely busy when we arrive, and it tends to slow as the night turns into morning and dawn. That being said, we don’t often get to mingle with rest of the hospital staff, and usually, our calls to said staff are short and sweet. In that, we just need to admit a patient to your service; please be kind, take them off our hands, off our tracker and move them up to the floor. Hopefully, admitting the patient without getting much resistance from the inpatient hospital medicine team.
Medicine is a small world, and many of us still keep communication open via social media but often many of our interactions with those who have come before us in training or who were former attendings — that we have gained valuable knowledge from previously — are often sparse. So this past Tuesday, the day after Labor Day when I needed a consult on a patient with new-onset seizures, I was happy to learn that the neurologist on call was an attending whom I had worked with previously. Yes, low and behold it was a former attending of mine. And while I knew he was at this facility, we hadn’t really had the opportunity to speak to each other for a consult previously. I had not yet spoken with him on this particular day as the resident initially gave him a report of the patient’s history and discussed his potential treatment plan with him over the phone. The neurologist, Dr. B, stated that he would come by to see the patient in the ED at the end of his clinic day. When the resident relayed this information to me, I just couldn’t help but feel over the moon about seeing this attending — now a colleague once again.
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