There is no "I" in team...just me

This is Madigan. It's the hospital where I work. For 51 weeks out of the year, I like my job. Many days, I even love it. One week out of the year, I hate my job so much that I fantasize about getting a weird illness that will briefly incapacitate me without being fatal. This is that week.

Normally, I work in a clinic as a developmental pediatrician, a career path chosen in no small part because of its lack of medical emergencies. I do pretty low-acuity, non-critical stuff. This week, I'm the pediatric ward attending. This means that I'm in charge of all the children who are admitted to the hospital because they are having high-acuity medical emergencies of a critical nature.

Usually, I have residents and interns who help with this. Everyone--attending, resident, etc...--makes up what is called the "ward team." If the hospital ward team were a tribal village, the interns would be the gatherers, looking up patient data, getting lab results, and finding out vitals. The residents would be the hunters, examining patients at their bedsides and performing procedures like lumbar punctures. The attending would be the village chief, making sure that things are being done right, helping make overall plans for patient care. Someone let the resident go to a medical conference this week in Miami and put the intern on night call (meaning they're not there during the day). This means that I have to perform all the roles in the village.

Did I mention that the ward is filled to capacity? And not with easy pediatric bread-and-butter stuff like babies with elevated bilirubin or dehydrated kids with diarrhea/vomiting--the kind of stuff I could do with my eyes closed and one hand behind my back. It's people with cancer, failure to thrive, physical abuse, congenital heart disease, metabolic disease, and the list goes on. It's like the village is on fire and, let me tell you, the chief is getting seriously burned out.

So I'm surviving for now, but not looking forward to the remainder of my week as attending (which ends Wednesday night). On the bright side, there's still time to come down with a good case of dengue!