Tips for the New Year

The “notes” of a pediatrician, translated, using the opposite means to schedule his workload around the New Year’s holidays, translated…

I’m not going home for New Year’s, so feel free to schedule me for the shifts.” Every time the New Year’s roll around, the various groups all wished to see this sort of a message, scheduling the shifts around the New Year’s holidays, it’s a big thing for every ward in the hospital, also, a struggle for power too.

The patients don’t want to stay in the wards to celebrate the New Year’s with their families, same for the medical staff members, we all want to go home too, and, the various wards would start “shutting down the beds”—meaning, discharging those who are able to go home, so they can go home, to reduce the number of in-patient care, to reduce the needed staff member.

And yet, those who are still staying in the hospitals would need to be looked after, and, the rounds would be done by a primary physician, with a cart of the medical records, going in and out of the ward, looking at the documented conditions from the day before, and, write out the summaries for the doctor on duty tomorrow, then, half a day is gone.  The assignments of work days around the New Year’s is also, specific, the physicians with the seniority, are normally assigned at the beginning or at the end of the New Year’s holidays, those who don’t visit their wives’ or mothers’ homes, who would be making the rounds are the greenhands, and, the saying of “a daughter became a mother-in-law” doesn’t just apply to the families, but also, the hospitals too.

And, every once in awhile, there would be the senior staff doctors who’d stated, “I’m out!”, then, goes off on the white clouds, floating away, what he’d meant was that he’d be checking up on all of his assigned patients, after all, one would know one’s own patients the best, no need to pass the shifts around, daily, it only, takes him, the time for a cup of tea.

And, the entry level clinics that worked like the 24/7 super convenience shops are another sort of story, hello, welcome to the treatment clinic would get blurted out from New Year’s Eve morning, to the fifth of the New Year, when work is to resume.  When it came to the morning shifts of New Year’s Eve, the workers had to charge up the blood sugar, as well as the spirits too.

illustration from UDN.com

First year I became a physician, I’d gone to this battlefield with a blank slat4e, and, not long thereafter, I’d come to understand what was meant by the never-ending registry of waiting patients, sat from eight in the morn to three in the afternoon, and I still have, a stack of patients, and, I’d, imagined that the hospital is a shop that people are lining up to get into, even on New Year’s Eve too!

This wasn’t the most difficult, the meds prescribed are three days a unit, because of the changes in the bodies of our patients, we don’t know what would happen for long.  On New Year’s Eve, we’d had to, polish our fortune-telling crystal ball to that brand new shine, and, predict on how the illnesses would progress for the five days that follow, and when the patients can stop the medications, when they need to head straight into the E.R., writing the prescriptions, also like the New Year’s Eve historical soaps too, whatever we come across, is whatever we treat, we must, estimate everything to the precisions.  And, all the energies drained from this, we will need a full course holiday off of eating, and sleeping, and drinking, to make up for.

Actually, I’m that guy that told everything, “Sure, sign me on for the New Year’s shifts!”.  After the New Year’s Holidays, when the costs of h9otel, and the sights of traffic jams returned back to normal, then, I’d, carried that carry-on, and, go off on my belated new year’s vacation that’s, way much, cheaper.

And so, this, is how you do it, you’d, avoided the crowds, and worked through your New Year’s vacations, and, that is how you adapted to life, because you get paid extra, for these shifts that everybody wanted to dodge out of, as the New Year’s is the time when we tend to gather with our loved ones, and, nobody wants to be scheduled for work, but you didn’t mind, because, you knew, that you get paid extra (cha-ching!!!), and that after the new year’s, you get to have your own, vacation, without the traffic jams, without the populated crowd.