Goodbye, MICU! Hello, wards!

Oh man, my last overnight call in the MICU was pretty rough. No sleep. All my other nights I slept at least 45 minutes to an hour, but the next morning I took the advice of my attending and just kept moving because if I stopped I would realize how tired I was. It's really my own fault for not getting any sleep. If things aren't too busy, I usually update future discharge summaries and note templates until 1 or 2 am. If all is quiet then, I aim to sleep between 2 and 5 am, but if a patient starts becoming unstable around then, sleep is hard to come by.

After a week on the wards, I surprisingly find myself missing the MICU. There's a wonderful sense of teamwork among your fellow interns and residents as well as with the nursing and support staff. They were all my new best friends because we depended on each other so much, and now if I pass by one of them in the hallway, we chat as if it's been years since we've seen one another.

However, there are things I don't miss about the MICU:
1. Overnight call every fourth night. It wasn't so bad at the beginning, but the sleep deprivation towards the end was making me a grouch.

2. Carrying the code pager and being on the code team. Although I had the code pager, codes were always announced on the overhead paging system first. I still get a catecholamine rush whenever there's an overhead announcement even though nine times out of ten it's something like "there will be a nondenominational mass held in the chapel at 11 am." Going to codes was fine because my role was well-defined (chest compressions, get an ABG, fetch anything that someone yelled out), but the constant state of readiness was exhausting.

3. Calling family members to let them know their loved one has taken a turn for the worse. I don't mind talking to families. I usually enjoy it, but breaking bad news isn't something that I want to do. It comes with the MICU territory because all the patients are so sick.

It's a bit of a shock to be on the wards again. My patients aren't intubated. They can talk to me, walk to the bathroom themselves, reposition for me to examine them, and often complain about the quality of the food. After being in MICU, these patients barely look sick to me, so I'm working on recalibrating my eyes. I can't say that the schedule is loads better than the MICU because some days I went home relatively early from the unit, but I can't emphasize how nice it is to sleep in my own bed more often.