Most annoying 5AM page:
"Hi, I'm calling from [Random Hospital miles away]. Does your rehab service do outside consults?"
The answer was no, but it was such a bizarre call, so I though maybe I was missing something. "Do you have an acute spinal cord admission?" I asked.
"I don't know," the person said.
Huh? "Well, what's wrong with the patient?"
"There's no specific patient. I just wanted to find out if you do outside consults."
Huh?????? So it's 5AM and this person decides to page our hospital and wake up the on call person to ask a general question of whether or not we do outside consults?? WTF?????????????
"Everybody told me you don't do outside consults," the person added, "but I wanted to make sure."
Honestly, I wish I hadn't been so tired and disoriented, because I would have liked to grill this person on what they were thinking by calling us. You're asking for a consult from another hospital and you don't even have a patient in mind??? But in an attempt to actually get some sleep, I just told them we don't do outside consults and hung up.
People are morons. The caller was probably one of my patients.
ReplyDeleteDuring an absolutely grueling 24 hour ICU call this week, I got paged by one of our nurses to fill out FMLA papers. At 4 am.
ReplyDeleteRecent call at 2:30 am:
ReplyDelete"I can't find this medication in the safe dosing book."
"It's okay, I checked the dose twice."
"I still need to check it."
"But the drug isn't due until like 10am. We can check with the pharmacy in the morning."
"I know, but I had some free time, and wanted to check the dose."