Sometimes, physicians have an unusual view of the world. I always remember growing up and loving when we would change from Daylight Savings Time back to standard time in the fall (fall back). I always loved to gain that extra hour and as a teenager it meant an extra hour of sleep. In actuality, normally, I would just stay up an extra hour and not feel bad because I knew I would not loose any sleep. The converse was true as well. I hated the start of Daylight Savings Time because it meant it was time to ‘spring forward’ and I was going to lose an hour of sleep or I would have to go to sleep an hour earlier. Of course, what I did not realize at the time, is that both of these days are meaningless when you have a small child. My son is not sleeping an extra hour when we fall back.
When I started surgical practice and was taking general surgery call we would take call for the hospital for the weekend and would start on Friday morning and it would run until Monday morning at 7:00 am. I quickly realized that if you were on call during the fall back weekend you had an extra hour of call that weekend and that meant an extra hour of taking call for the emergency room. Don’t get me started on how you document something during that hour that happens twice!
However, the opposite was true as well. If you took call on the ‘spring forward’ weekend you had an hour less of emergency room call. That was the weekend I wanted! You would not think that 71 hours vs 72 hours vs 73 hours would be a big deal, but it sure felt that way to me. So while everyone else was sad about losing an hour, I was ecstatic.
Another place where I found I had an unusual world view was also related to call weekends. After spending the 71-73 hours on call for the weekend and the day starting on Monday morning, I can not tell you how many times I was the happiest person in the hospital when Monday morning at 0700 hours arrived. I was no longer taking new consults and I was no longer covering the entire service. I would talk about this often with my surgical assistant Leslie at the scrub sink in the morning. I would be washing my hands for my first elective (or add on) case and while the rest of the staff had the Monday morning blues, I was gleeful that the weekend was over and I knew that when I went home that night, someone else had the call.
If you have other examples of strange ways physicians view the world compared with everyone else–share them with me!