First Night Shift...*cries*

Yesterday Anita and I reported to L&D at 8:00 pm and found Chris and Aaron still there, waiting for their team to check out and my team to check in. My team has one fourth year, one second year, and one intern, all of whom seem like cool, friendly people. One of the first things we got to do was observe a C-section. Anita was supposed to get scrubbed in and see the surgery up close, but when she did get scrubbed in, there was no gown for her b/c no one told the surgical nurse she was scrubbing in. So we had to watch the C-section from afar, and wow, there was lots of blood. When they pulled the baby out, her skin was a dusky purple color but she started crying and moving around immediately, which was good =)

Things went downhill after that. I was sent to do an H&P but ran into a language hurdle when the patients couldn't speak English. After that Anita and I just hung out in the doctors' lounge practicing tying knots on a "giant vagina" (really a towel folded so that it looked like one), reading our lecture notes, or just talking. There were two IUFD (intrauterine fetal deaths) mothers in L&D, and we got to see one fetus after it was delivered. At 24 weeks old, it was less than one foot long and looked as though it was made of Jell-O. Its facial features were indistinguishable, and some docs thought it may have been Trisomy 13. Either way, it was sad.

Around 3:30 a.m., Anita took a nap while I did Qbank questions online. Yes, it was that boring on L&D; the babies just weren't coming out. Around 4:00 a.m. we followed one of the family residents, Dr. B, into one room to watch him insert a catheter into a cervix. In the room across from ours, one woman was in the process of giving birth. Over and over, we heard, "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, all right, push push push! You're doing great! 1, 2, 3..." and so on and so forth. Dr. B said it was like a rodeo in there. It took a while, but that baby was born at 4:15 a.m. Then it was dead until 5:00 a.m. when we went on rounds with Dr. B and learned to write progress notes. We saw Marcus and Jedd at 6:00 a.m. and the other girls around 7:00 a.m, when we left. By then I was starving since the last meal I had was at midnight, so Anita and I grabbed breakfast at McDonalds. Normally we'd go home after that, but no, we had a 2 hr lecture that ended up lasting until 9:45 a.m. Anita and I were taking turns falling asleep throughout the lecture, and it was such a relief when we were allowed to go home. Even better was when the shuttle bus (with Jon onboard; he's doing surgery now) stopped on the side of the road to pick us up so we didn't have to walk all the way back to the garage

So now it's past 10:30 am and I am blogging when I should be sleeping. My priorities do suck. Hopefully I can get at least 5 hrs of sleep before the hell begins again at 6:00 pm

*edit* Nope...I got two hours of nap-sleep, and 2 hours of true REM sleep. Four hours ain't gonna be enough to keep me awake tonight...