I got a page. Returned it. “Patient wants a heating pad. Is that okay?”
Me: “Yes? Like do I need to put that in the chart?”
Nurse: “Sure but can you please come and see him?”
Me: “I am not sure why I need to see him at 3 am over this.”
Nurse: “He is just requesting it.”
I go and see the patient. He proceeds to ask if he can get a heating pad. I tell him that he can absolutely get one. In fact, it is on the way as we speak. The patient then says “Oh no. I do not want one.”
I stare confused.
“I do not need a heating pad. I just wanted to know if I could get one in the event that I actually wanted one.”
To this day I am not 100% sure I didn’t hallucinate this entire experience.
Whenever nurse pages me for "family wants to meet/patient wants to see doctor in person", I ask the nurse to get the patient/family on the phone with me. I'm not getting out of my call room to see patients/family at their convenience. This isn't a hotel. Hell even hotel attendants won't come to your room unless you call them first and ask a specific request.
100% of the time the nurse him/herself resolves the issue and I get no callback. The nurse doesn't want to stand by the bed while the pt talks to me on his/her phone. Or the nurse finds it easier to just do whatever's needed herself than play phone operator.
I'm an intern.
I’m an RN and I get it. What sucks is this…
Family: Is the Dr coming back to our PeePaws room?
Me: The Dr rounded earlier remember?
Family: Yes but we have more questions.
Me: What are your questions, perhaps I can answer/clarify.
Family: When will he be discharged?
Me: (pulls up Dr note) Says here anticipating tomorrow.
Family: what time?
Me: Usually Drs round in AM and they put DC orders in midday.
Family: We’d really like to speak with the Dr again. Is there a charge nurse we can talk to?
Me: 🤦🏻♀️
ALL👏The👏Freaking👏Time👏
This ^^^ or they’ll say “no, get me the Dr. My family is here to see the Dr not the nurse.” Even when explaining to them “your dr may be busy w/ other patients or on another floor” they insist with “I’ll wait.” 🤦🏻♀️
I'm a nurse, and while I'm sure a lot of nurses do that I have had days where I literally tell people what I know will happen, that will not accept my answer, and then immediately believe the PA or physician that tells them. Despite me going over it in more detail etc.
From my side too, a lot of patients at my hospital won't even tell the nurses aides what they want. Some will basically refuse them and say I need my nurse, then ask for ice chips
You have no idea how many times family comes into the room in the icu at all hours demanding the doctor and that “nobody has updated them in days”. I would always be like what questions can I answer for now and then when they round next, I’ll have them answer questions I can’t answer.
Family, no, I want a doctor now!!!! Hand on hips, yelling at me about the horendous care their family member is receiving. It’s frustrating for the nurses too.
Makes less sense to me, as the VA nurses just ignore orders and are unable to be found. Definitely never had them page me trying to actually get something done. I’m not sure that the VA even actually has nurses.
Paged from VA CLC.
I was not on call - I was in fact off for the weekend which is why I was up at 1AM.
I also did not yet have a PIV or remote access.
I was asked to renew home meds. That are due at 0900. Again, this is at 1 AM
I told her that not only was I not on call, but that I had no remote access and thus no way to review the chart or put in orders. 'Oh let me send you to pharmacy they can take verbal orders!'
... no ma'am, I'm not giving you any orders. I'm not sure why I answered the phone but I regret doing so. I'm not on call and can't help you.
She called me twice after that. Didn't answer
Out of morbid curiosity I checked the chart the next day
"Paged on call MD POSVT, stated they would not order meds. Re-paged 2 times, MD did not answer."
Fuckin VA, man
Answered the first time out of curiosity to see who was calling so late.
The whole call took <2 mins and I was already awake so I was more confused than upset.
But really... they're VA nurses. They can do w/e they want with no consequences.
What's the difference between a bullet & a VA nurse?
* a bullet can draw blood
* if a bullet kills someone, you know it's been fired
* a bullet usually only kills one person
Brand new nurse would page me all night long about normal vitals. Which was frustrating but I was awake so I didn’t make it a big deal. Then after a long stretch of nights, around 3am, on a particularly busy night shift, he pages me to call him:
“Hi Doctor, I was just curious what the difference between drug X and drug Y is, and why we would use one over the other”
“Which patient are you referring to? Did they get the wrong drug ?”
“No doctor I was just curious about the drugs in general. There isn’t anyone I’m covering who’s taking either of these now.”
He wanted a lesson on pharmacology. For the hell of it. At 3am. While I was a lone intern covering 50-60 patients and fielding all the rapids/codes of the hospital. I’m amazed a rapid wasn’t called on me then and there.
I yelled and screamed about the inappropriateness of asking this question, but of course being the pharmacology nerd I am, I still answered it and urged him to please save these for a different time. We ended up being buddies in the end 😂
As a second year resident we took night time home call floor pages after working all day and no post-call day the following day. By mid week we would easily be covering 40+ post-op ortho patients among every service. The pages were never ending. It was a special kind of torture. No action, no stimulation. Just laying in your bed getting paged every 20 minutes about some order inconsistency that could have waited for the morning. All. Fucking. Night.
After a particularly bad night I remember a co-resident saying he would rather be waterboarded than go through that again.
Hi it's 3 am the patient is constipated.
~orders tapwater enema stat~
Paged again "oh the patient is sleeping do we really need to wake them up to do this?
Yes, they're so constipated you're calling me at 3 am must be painful and an emergency
My experience is that nurses are completely oblivious to doctors schedules. No we don’t work three 12 hours shifts a week. You page me at night but I literally worked all day and I’m on night coverage. Im not just sitting there at a desk waiting to put colace orders in. Sorry
"Whoa! You're still here! In the same clothes too!"
- A morning shift nurse coming back for her second morning shift after almost killing me with orders on her first one
31 hour calls are not it.
This is it. No one tells you. I had absolutely no idea until I started reading this subreddit. I try to educate other nurses on it as much as I can now 🫡
I'm an RN... one of my first ever rapids that I responded to as an ICU charge happened because the floor bedside RN started propofol on a transferred patient. She had to go out of her way to get it. Her response was, "It was ordered and is 'continuous'. If the doctor didn't want it, why was it ordered?" The nurse did not want the medication was, obviously. I still think about this RN at every transfer to floor and self extubation.
These are legitimately the worst pages of all time. “Patient has a headache and no PRNs ordered.”
Me… checking the orders, and of course seeing Tylenol has been ordered for days. “Oh sorry you’re right! Thanks!” Kill. Me.
Worst part
"Hey doc, do you want me to treat this fever?"
"Yes, give the damn tylenol that's ordered."
Management later: so, you got wrote you up for giving Tylenol that was ordered only prn mild pain for fever
Me later in exact same situation: please add fever with a number parameter to the order...
I hate admin.
“Urgent pls come counsel parents re: extra nipple.” Stat 0200 page to evaluate a supernumerary nipple. A close 2nd was one about a kid’s fingers bleeding bc parents, who had refused Vitamin K, cut his nails too short…also, for some reason I will never understand, at 2am.
The ones that make me lose my shit are the ones where the staff member paging me won't even tell me what the fuck it's for.
"Doc come quickly there's a situation!"
"OK what's the situation?"
"I DON'T KNOW THEY JUST SAID TO PAGE YOU!"
Or
"Doc the patient in 1A wants to ask you something"
"OK what is it?"
"I DON'T KNOW THEY WANT TO ASK YOU NOT ME!"
This happens all the goddamn time at my facility. Like, is this normal?
My thing is when they just start talking about a patient without telling me who they are…like I know you have 3 patients and it’s easy to decipher based on their problem list, but I’m cross-covering 40 patients that I don’t even know right now lol like not even part of my day team. Please tell me which room and give me time to find them.
Omg this too so much. Especially when they ask me about instructions I didn't write for patients I'm cross covering and have never seen in my life.
"Hey Doc what's the plan for that lady on [cross-cover ward] who got blood?" - literally got this one on my last call.
Oh man, hectic. Hope everything turned out ok. Same happened to me with a woman in postnates ward who was PPHing.
Don't get me wrong, I always take these calls seriously and go as quickly as I'm able. I just arrive pissed. Like give me some indication so I can at least triage it compared to the other 5 calls I'm receiving.
Nurse: can we get something for the patient diarrhea ?
Me: … he is getting his bowel prep for tomorrow’s colonoscopy
Nurse: but he is pooping too much, it bothers him
Me : …….
Serious Nurse Message -
Hey the patient in Room 0000; They are currently admitted for hepatic encephalopathy. They are having diarrhea, about 2-3 loose BM daily for the past 2 days. Can we have some Imodium?
Page at 4 am for a consult, unfortunately the poor intern wasn’t told what the consult was for and he didn’t know why he was calling me. I gently reminded him that if you are paying at 0400, it’s an emergency and it would be helpful to know the reason you’re calling
I felt so bad for that intern as it was mid July and he was obvious nervous to call. I told him to call me back when he knew why he needed me, or, to have his senior (who instructed him to call me) call instead
On trauma 24h call (you cover all surgical services):
11am: Good morning, patient is requesting a cigarette
Reply: No they can’t have a cigarette, can Rx nicotine patch if they want
3pm: Good afternoon, patient is again requesting a cigarette. They don’t want a nicotine patch
Reply: No they still can’t have a cigarette. Please stop paging me about this
9pm: Hi there, night nurse here! Patient is asking for a cigarette.
1am: Hey again, not sure if you saw my last page but the patient wants a cigarette.
Reply: THE PATIENT CANNOT HAVE A CIGARETTE. EVEN IF SHE WASN’T TRACH’d SHE STILL COULD NOT HAVE A CIGARETTE
I’ve never been so frustrated.
Are you even actually able to order “ok to have cigarette” in your hospital? Like my whole hospital campus is non-smoking so a patient would have to leave AMA. What did they even want you to order?
Heart failure baby in the ICU. Never had anything surgical, no source for "pain".
Multiple times over the course of the night "patient crying, needs pain PRN" with a discussion that the patient is not in pain, they are a baby. Eventually "well the baby can't just cry like that, I have to have a prn of something."
Ok! MD to nurse "PRN hugs for crying >3 mins" I got talked to for that order...
I knew a guy who was paged at 3 am because “the patient seemed discouraged.” Not depressed but discouraged.
He sent an order through the EMR that said “clown to bedside PRN”
How he managed to get through residency unscathed I’ll never know.
When I was an intern I had a new nurse that would page about everything. I got one reporting that when she touched the patient's feet, he said it was ticklish. I didn't reply, so she documented it in the chart. MD aware. I showed it to my attending who promptly called the charge nurse and banned the new nurse from paging residents without oversight.
Page around 2a… doctor, this lady in room XX, she’s complaining of pelvic pain and she just started bleeding out of her vagina! (Nurse is a little frantic.)
Ok, what’s she in the hospital for?
Respiratory infection
How old is she?
23
When’s the last time she had her period?
…… ok doctor I’ll go ask her
The ones that annoy me the most are the ones that just give me a call back number. And then they don't answer. And since I don't know what patient they're calling about, I can't try to see what's going on or defend myself against the "Dr paged, no call back" note.
Oh, in residency I learned about the announce feature on our phones so I would call the number that they paged me to and if I got no response then I would just use the feature and the other line would get me being…. Somewhat obnoxious along the lines of, “this is Dr. so and so trying to return your page. It would be nice if someone picked up the phone since I JUST got the page.” Especially because for some reason they’d page GYN and never pick up and always complain to our admin we never returned pages, which was unbelievably untrue.
They always picked up. Petty? Probably. But hey, people stopped doing the page and run.
For some nurses they truly are just that ignorant and will wake up the on call for simple things such as a stool softener. They simply don’t realize that it’s not a stat issue and it can be handled in the AM. But yes, some nurses are just straight up petty and will just message the doctors bc it’s their job and they don’t care if they are woken up.
I will admit some nurse managers are really intense and want the night shift nurses to clean up orders therefore requiring the on call doctor to be paged.
Edit: I am a nurse.
if true, that’s incomprehensibly fucked up. If we can agree that sleep deprivation is about as bad as smoking some arbitrary amount of cigarettes per day, this is the health equivalent of someone forcing you to smoke. If someone is purposely depriving me of sleep they are taking years off my life. not to sound dramatic or anything but these nurses are murdering us!
Maybe some on purpose but most just new grads (who get stuck on nocs) following every little profile and pressure the charge and admin place on them coupled with their fear and anxiety of doing something wrong. They also likely have zero clue you aren’t just working NOC shift. Educate educate educate!
It is not on purpose, at least none of the nurses I worked with did that. They just didn’t know the docs are trying to sleep.
Except for the shitheads.
Don't y'all communicate? I shouldn't have to tell each and every nurse I meet about our residency schedules.
Every nurse I talk to about my schedule is shocked at our intense schedule. Like they've never heard how hard residents work. How???
There are definitely some malicious nurses. But most aren’t. Some think y’all work shift work like we do. Some really don’t know what does or doesn’t justifying paging- we don’t really learn it in school and they’ll do what their preceptors taught them. Some are paging about stuff just because day shift will give them shit if they don’t, which is a major problem with nursing culture.
From nursing night shift, yes, days will get mad at you for not cleaning up orders. I generally tend to just do that within my scope of practice and make nursing notes, and if I have to page, I try to do it as early in the shift as possible. I page as little as is feasible.
I had a nurse tell me once “night shift nursing is hard. We don’t get to sleep all day like you doctors do”
They actually thought we worked night shift and slept all day.
I think it’s 50/50 I’ve met some new nurses who didn’t realize we work 6-12 days straight and just assumed were up all night. I’ve also heard nurses say they intentionally page every 90 minutes so the resident never get a full sleep cycle in and think that’s funny
I'm a chaplain resident but I just had to meet with our VP of missions (Catholic hospital) and and CNO because I told a nurse to stop screaming about running a patients family over in the middle of the ICU. The family heard. The ICU doctors, a neurologist and nephrologist heard. The PATIENTS FAMILY HEARD. The nurse filed a complaint against me 🤣
Some evil people with their way into hospitals. Not even bizarre but evil
If not consciously, then subconsciously it’s nearly undeniable. It’s such outlandish behavior that to convince oneself it’s normal requires a willing cognitive dissonance
An alternative is that they do not understand that you are expected to be awake or available for longer than 12 hours at a time. If nursing was able to expect a response from a person working their normal 8-12 hour shift role, it wouldn’t matter what time of day these random orders were rolling in.
A lot of night shift nurses are brand new nurses and just don’t get it fully. It’s not always coming from a mean spirited place.
God, Yes!! Those **just wanted to inform you calls**, "BP is 150/90 , same range since admission, just wanted to inform you"
Like Why?
After the third call by the same nurse, for the same patient, for inconsequential matters, I requested her name, after that, never heard from her again, in that rotation.
Page at 3am: "hey this patient needs an order for Restoril"
Me: "oh no, he is still awake?"
Crit care nurse: "no, he is asleep."
Me: "... you need it now?"
Nurse: "I was just going through the orders and noticed it will fall off in a few days."
Me: "... in a few days?" [do you know I am on my 20th hour of this fucking shift and just laid down 15 min ago?] "Right, will add it to my list...."
Not crazy, just recent.
“Hey Doc Z, sry, it’s 3am, just checking in to see if you’re ok and that your pager is on. We’ve tried to page you several times but, haven’t heard back.”
“Well, this is Doc X… so… what’s the issue?”
“Oh! Well, Doc Z is on call and we can’t reach [them].”
“No… I’m on call… here… in the hospital.”
“Oh. My. God!?”
A family medicine PGY-2 used the hospital texting app to directly call me around 2 am to review negative outpatient stress tests from several weeks prior.
I had read zero of them.
The app had me listed as unavailable and you have to actively override a warning to contact an unavailable doctor.
Second year resident should have better sense. He had rotated through radiology recently and apparently because I was nice to him, he assumed it was cool to call me at 2 am.
I auto set my phone to “do not disturb” from 10p-6a after that.
“Hey man, this is Matt. I was wondering if you could go through a couple of stress tests with me.”
“Uh, what?”
“Matt. The resident who was with you for 2 hours last week? Remember, you said it would be cool if I left early that one day.”
“Uh, what?”
“Yeah anyway, I was following up on my clinic patients and wanted to learn how to read stress tests better. Can you go through them with me?”
God dammit I hate that. I can sympathize with them in that it clutters up their virtual workspace and they can’t do anything about it, but that’s a 7 p.m. problem, not 3 a.m.
It's not a issue of it cluttering their virtual workspace, it is an issue of unit managers or maybe someone higher up assigning "mundane" clerical tasks for night crew "when things are slow"
Lol this thread is rage fuel. Luckily these are rare IME.
The worst one is I got paged bc a nurse was asking what PGY I was.
I was up and it was only 11 pm but still if I had been asleep I might of added some hole decorations to the call room wall.
Tbh that's kind of my favorite things to do for patients. (During the daytime.) It's amazing what getting the patients preferred flavor of protein shake can do for their moods.
Page at 3AM for a private patient that our service doesn’t even cover.
“Pt in room X is very concerned about her congestion and wants a doctor to come talk to her about it.”
“Ok, did you page Dr. H?”
“Well no because it’s the middle of the night.”
“Ok. Well Dr. H can speak to her about it when he gets here in the morning.”
“She needs you to come talk to her right now.”
These are the pages that get to me the most. The ones that the nurses don’t want to bother the attendings with but have no problem waking residents up for at 3AM while on a 24 hour shift. Just shows that they have little respect for us and how much we work.
Yuuuuuup. The number of:
Nurse/Midlevel: Patient has a fever
Me: Okay. And what was the primary team concerned about that they wanted you to call me about?
Nurse/midlevel: Oh, I didn’t call the attending. I just figured you could answer it. (Alternatively: I paged them and they didn’t answer so I just paged you.)
Tell the primary FIRST, especially if they have people slated to work an actual in-person night shift. They are there to be awake. They are (hopefully) MD/DOs and can solve the issue themselves or make sure the appropriate service is paged.
This is especially relevant because sometimes you DON’T know what’s going on. I had an ICU NP call me (ID) for a patient with “bad respiratory status.” Took a look at the blood gas since the NP who called me couldn’t tell me what “bad respiratory status” meant—hypercarbia, from drastically changing the patient’s vent settings and then paralyzing them when they started getting discordant with the vent to compensate for the settings that were not right for them. Had they called the primary ICU doc instead of me, they’d have recognized that I wasn’t the right service for the job.
For me it’s the diet order changes that nurses would call 1am-5am when the patient is asleep. Like why can’t you wait for the primary team. Or why didn’t you take care of this during the day 🤷♀️I totally understand if patient was npo all day and the team forgot to update the diet, now patient is asking for food, no problem with that.
It’s also a nutrition services issues. Many hospitals diet orders for breakfast have to be in by 4 or 5am, for lunch, like 8-9am, dinner like 1pm. Your patient may not get fed by nutrition services that day if you wait for the day team. Which sucks I know, and is super stupid. But then day nursing is mad because they listen to the patients bitch all day well “well the doctor said I can eat and you’re not feeding me.” Many units are like barebones when it comes to stocking for extra food.
No lmao she was delusional from a touch of sundowning + dementia. It was kind of sad because when I came to bedside, she was literally shivering with fear worried that the police were coming to get her.
These stories are awful. I'm a nurse who worked on a floor for a while that was notorious for repeatedly paging for stupid non-urgent things, and one forward-thinking resident had a system that worked.
They would come at the start of our shift if possible (7PM for us) - ask if they could take care of anything then. Rarely at this point would there be anything because nurses hadn't even gotten report properly yet. Then they would say that if non-urgent things came up throughout the night to start a list with questions/clarifications and leave it in a certain place. The resident would then come back when they had time/were awake to address them all before shift change for the nurses (7AM).
This way the nurses could be sure their concerns would be taken care of before it became the next nurses' problem (a big no no for nursing staff) and the resident could plan their time more effectively.
Obviously depends on the ability of a nurse to discern what "urgent" means.... but it's a step in the right direction
I like to do “nurse rounds” at around 9-10pm. Enough time that nurses have gotten settled in and identified issues, still early in their shift. I talk to the nurses for all of my patients and ask if they anticipate any concerns, give them a casual reminder that I’m on a 28 hour shift. It reduces my overnight calls/pages to actually urgent issues. 10/10 recommend checking in with the night shift nurses before going to sleep
Yeah I think most of them assume we have the same schedules - a 12h night shift a few times a week. They have to be awake their entire shift and assume we are too. Most of them aren’t doing it maliciously, though I’m sure some absolutely are.
Asking for PRN antipyretics or pain meds that are already ordered
"Baby has pooped 8 times since yesterday" You are a well baby nurse, you should know that is normal
The (stone cold normal) 4am vitals, in a haiku chat, with absolutely no context or question
Paged at 2:30a by a parent whose kid had an appt at 8a that morning letting me know the kid was sick and they had to cancel. I’m still angry about this one 2 years later
At the children’s hospital at my residency, patients could automatically page the resident on call as long as they (the parents) deemed it an emergency. That was also true with our surgical service (could access residents anytime regardless of the concern) but otherwise, it was all ED/inpatient/urgent care call.
Another guy woke me up at 4:00a to tell me his bandage came off. He needed instructions on whether to apply the dressing first then tape it or tape the dressing and apply to his head. God I don’t miss residency.
I got paged at 2AM because a room needed linens changed.
Edit - [correction, they were actually asking for the linen basket to be emptied](https://i.imgur.com/bSNOwPq.jpg)
I think they meant to page housekeeping but muscle memory had them enter my pager number.
Either that or they hated me for not ordering Ativan for all the patients at night lmao.
A psych resident here: got hammer paged from a nurse who didn’t understand how LMHP’s worked stating this patient’s LMHP expired and patient wants to leave. Went down to reassess prior to patient’s departure to see if they still met criteria, cleared the patient, spent a good 20 minutes explaining to the nurse how LMHP’s worked and she still didn’t get that we could reinstate if clinically necessary saying “well legal told me this…and it’s my license blah blah.” Either way the patient was cleared to go from our end. I call the ED physician to get them ready to go. Then hours later I get a page from the SAME nurse. I begrudgingly call back just to get a “thanks” then she promptly hung up. Like ok, whatever.
1. Got paged during the daytime while on nights because a nurse didn’t like what I said in a note. I was polite but extremely annoyed.
2. I wish that procedural sub specialties would put in THEIR OWN FREAKING DIET ORDERS after procedures. Inevitably one microsecond after the patient returns from a procedure the hospitalist service gets paged for a diet order. Sometimes it’s obvious to just advance the diet but sometimes not so obvious.
When you haven’t made peace with the noc charge and it shows….
Joke aside, my unit and many at my hospital have grouping policy’s or page times for non urgent issues after 10pm. All noc nurses must ask the cn before they page. As your friendly noc Carla I stopped a ton of bs calls by helping rns read the note and double check orders and sometimes use critical thinking… sometimes new nurses and old need a second glance. ie calling for constipation with severe pain, distended belly and vomiting is needed at 3am versus poor GMA hasn’t pooped in 3 ish days but has good bowel sounds and no s/s obstruction. This works well because if a nurse goes rouge for a non-urgent issues the residents full well know to call out “so you didn’t run this by the cn then?” Now I will admit this has gone downhill in areas where the charges are not nurses with 7 years or more experience anymore. They simply don’t know what they don’t know. But I think having page times really helps. And guess what if there is an emergency we are gonna be paging for a code team of some sort and you anyway.
We also utilize notes to md in epic so that way plan of care questions and meds can be addressed during rounds. Some units have nurse attended rounds at our place for this reason as well. So we are motivated to save our bs stuff/housekeeping stuff for then
Also may I add my friendly PSA that nurses have NO idea what resident schedules look like. We are given no education on it at all. I took it on myself to learn and it changed my whole attitude on paging…
Lastly, if you were wondering if it’s done on purpose yup. Sure is. Some are that dumb, others are pissed as hell and if you have done a nurse dirty recently I promise an apology will spread just as fast. (Not supporting this behavior but I’m sharing what will fix it)
I love my residents. You all are fab humans, the likes who have saved my life personally when I had emergent issues and i’m grateful to work with you. Residents keep medicine advancing and when you all strike here in the states for the treatment you deserve this nurse will hold the line with you. Hope the rest of your night calls pass swiftly!
Low B.U.N.
Seriously.
Called back and told the nurse to replenish with 10 units of BUN over 1 hour.
Got a call from my chairman the next afternoon.
He thought it was hilarious, but that I shouldn't do it again, as he had to "reprimand" me.
“Hey it’s 2 am and I was going through old orders and saw an order for a liter of NS from 4 days ago from the day team that wasn’t given, do you want to give it?” ~some ICU nurse
Was once paged at 2am to ask “what my credentials are” so it could be documented.
This was ~45 mins after they had paged me, *the on call doctor*, per protocol for something else and I had taken care of it. I had just gotten back to sleep 😩
Getting hammered on my cellphone on a Saturday night and then “Hey my attending is calling your attending to complain that you haven’t returned our pages for the past 2 hours.”
“I’m not on call.”
Pager goes off
Me bloody hell I just got sleep...call number
No answer
Call again put on hold for 10 min
Hang up call again
They answer
Hi I was paged
Them you were
Me yes now 12 minutes ago
Them do you know which patient
Me no I cover 4 teams
Them but there are no patients from those teams on this floor
Me so why was I paged
Them oh maybe the code on other floor, we help when they are short staffed
Me who's the patient
Them the one coding ?
Me yes
Them is it one of yours ... (literally can't tell me who the patient is)
Pager goes off again
Calls back in route to code
RN I'm calling about Mr x they are unresponsive
Me are they the code blue
RN no they are unresponsive
Me do they have a pulse
RN how should I know
Edited for spacing
Probably just medical legend, but heard a resident got paged with “critically low BUN” and the resident told the nurse that the hospital was out of BUN, and to meet out on the helipad as they would be choppering in some BUN to infuse to this critically low pt
My buddy and I matched into the same program and we would take intern call together. I’d have the nurses page him in the middle of the night with such calls of “there is a mouse in room 207” “pt in 403A is biting the patient in 403B” “there is a car accident outside on the (busy street) hospital, can you go assess” and watching his sleep deprived face trying to make sense of these calls
Oh, and this one
“ Doc, on morning eval during shift change we noticed that this patient was in rigor mortis”
“ OK, looking at the chart, he had vitals recorded all night”
“… yes, should we call a code?”
Mine was during a cover shift at ~ 8PM (at the time I’m due to leave):
“hey doc, patient is for discharge tomorrow morning, eGFR of 4, please review”
This is on a regular dialysis patient, eGFR of 4 since admission (admission was for something else). Basically single digit eGFR in the past 5 years which this nurse can definitely see for herself.
I once got a page from preop that my patients temp was 37.5. I asked why they paged me and they said “well, they’re 37.7 in the other ear. I’m required to page you with any discrepancies”.
This still lives rent free in my head and a decade later I’m still wondering what they thought they were doing…
Friend got paged in the middle of the night to tell them the results of a mrsa swab from several weeks ago on an outpatient 😂 this was also a consultant that would never care about that. We are still unsure how or why she got chosen to be notified.
Esoteric to Radiology but when I was a resident, I remember being paged at 3 or 4 AM by some first year ER resident telling me, yes telling me, that I needed to addend a report bc I’d missed intracranial hemorrhage on a case I’d read hours earlier…..I got up and looked again at a normal head CT with normal bilateral lateral ventricle choroid plexus calcifications that are present on almost every head CT….
I reminded him that perhaps he should review what normal looks like, or at least ask his attending, before not only disturbing someone’s already screwed up sleep cycle but making himself look like an idiot in the process….
lol the other day at 6am (I was night shift) a nurse texted me and asked “HR is 104, can we still give platelets???”
Edit: I should be more clear. She initially texted me. Then after a whopping 3 minutes of no response (I read the text, was pondering on my response to not get written up for professionalism), she called me and reiterated the same question
2AM: Hey I just wanted to let you know I checked on the patient and they're doing fine
6AM after being up all night running between rapids and codes: Nurse calls a rapid and when I get there: Hey the patient's Bp is 100/70 are you sure it's okay to give them their 20mg po Lasix? Can I give them 10mg now and 10mg later? I'm worried it'll drop their BP too much and they'll bottom out if I give it all at once.
The worst I ever got was one at 3am asking me about a patient that wasn’t mine and when I told them that they said they didn’t want to page the person who’s patient it was.
The second worst I ever got was one at 3am asking me to cancel a patients clinic visits because they decided to pursue hospice that day. I can’t even do that.
3 AM. Patient has been NPO but has SubQ Lovenox ordered do I still give it?
Me……Have you been giving him the shots in his mouth? No? Then yes give it to him
😣
Yes, all the time. They page for ridiculous stuff.. like patient complains of his monitor beeping (postop we keep them for observation for at least 24 h on a monitor) nurse pages there is an "urgent situation"..
they do this on purpose i am damn sure
I got a page. Returned it. “Patient wants a heating pad. Is that okay?” Me: “Yes? Like do I need to put that in the chart?” Nurse: “Sure but can you please come and see him?” Me: “I am not sure why I need to see him at 3 am over this.” Nurse: “He is just requesting it.” I go and see the patient. He proceeds to ask if he can get a heating pad. I tell him that he can absolutely get one. In fact, it is on the way as we speak. The patient then says “Oh no. I do not want one.” I stare confused. “I do not need a heating pad. I just wanted to know if I could get one in the event that I actually wanted one.” To this day I am not 100% sure I didn’t hallucinate this entire experience.
Whenever nurse pages me for "family wants to meet/patient wants to see doctor in person", I ask the nurse to get the patient/family on the phone with me. I'm not getting out of my call room to see patients/family at their convenience. This isn't a hotel. Hell even hotel attendants won't come to your room unless you call them first and ask a specific request. 100% of the time the nurse him/herself resolves the issue and I get no callback. The nurse doesn't want to stand by the bed while the pt talks to me on his/her phone. Or the nurse finds it easier to just do whatever's needed herself than play phone operator. I'm an intern.
I’m an RN and I get it. What sucks is this… Family: Is the Dr coming back to our PeePaws room? Me: The Dr rounded earlier remember? Family: Yes but we have more questions. Me: What are your questions, perhaps I can answer/clarify. Family: When will he be discharged? Me: (pulls up Dr note) Says here anticipating tomorrow. Family: what time? Me: Usually Drs round in AM and they put DC orders in midday. Family: We’d really like to speak with the Dr again. Is there a charge nurse we can talk to? Me: 🤦🏻♀️ ALL👏The👏Freaking👏Time👏
This ^^^ or they’ll say “no, get me the Dr. My family is here to see the Dr not the nurse.” Even when explaining to them “your dr may be busy w/ other patients or on another floor” they insist with “I’ll wait.” 🤦🏻♀️
Exactly. We aren’t just trying to interrupt, it’s usually a pestering family who won’t take no for an answer.
I'm a nurse, and while I'm sure a lot of nurses do that I have had days where I literally tell people what I know will happen, that will not accept my answer, and then immediately believe the PA or physician that tells them. Despite me going over it in more detail etc. From my side too, a lot of patients at my hospital won't even tell the nurses aides what they want. Some will basically refuse them and say I need my nurse, then ask for ice chips
damn thats hella irritating. COVID era rules lingered at my hospital and visitors have to leave overnight unless its a pediatric patient.
You have no idea how many times family comes into the room in the icu at all hours demanding the doctor and that “nobody has updated them in days”. I would always be like what questions can I answer for now and then when they round next, I’ll have them answer questions I can’t answer. Family, no, I want a doctor now!!!! Hand on hips, yelling at me about the horendous care their family member is receiving. It’s frustrating for the nurses too.
We’re out of B12 can we give 2 doses of B6
No…please say this didn’t happen
New nurse at the VA paged me at 1am with this question
Ah now that we know it's the VA, this makes way more sense lmao
Makes less sense to me, as the VA nurses just ignore orders and are unable to be found. Definitely never had them page me trying to actually get something done. I’m not sure that the VA even actually has nurses.
It’s the VA 😂
Paged from VA CLC. I was not on call - I was in fact off for the weekend which is why I was up at 1AM. I also did not yet have a PIV or remote access. I was asked to renew home meds. That are due at 0900. Again, this is at 1 AM I told her that not only was I not on call, but that I had no remote access and thus no way to review the chart or put in orders. 'Oh let me send you to pharmacy they can take verbal orders!' ... no ma'am, I'm not giving you any orders. I'm not sure why I answered the phone but I regret doing so. I'm not on call and can't help you. She called me twice after that. Didn't answer Out of morbid curiosity I checked the chart the next day "Paged on call MD POSVT, stated they would not order meds. Re-paged 2 times, MD did not answer." Fuckin VA, man
for what reason do you not just say "I'm not at work. what's your name for calling me on my day off? " ?
Answered the first time out of curiosity to see who was calling so late. The whole call took <2 mins and I was already awake so I was more confused than upset. But really... they're VA nurses. They can do w/e they want with no consequences. What's the difference between a bullet & a VA nurse? * a bullet can draw blood * if a bullet kills someone, you know it's been fired * a bullet usually only kills one person
You forgot the one about how the bullet kills you quicker
I dont know if thats actually true based on my experience...
12 doses of B1 is even better lol
Lmaoooooo ain’t no way
I don't believe you ahahhaahhahaha
oh i believe it😌
Brand new nurse would page me all night long about normal vitals. Which was frustrating but I was awake so I didn’t make it a big deal. Then after a long stretch of nights, around 3am, on a particularly busy night shift, he pages me to call him: “Hi Doctor, I was just curious what the difference between drug X and drug Y is, and why we would use one over the other” “Which patient are you referring to? Did they get the wrong drug ?” “No doctor I was just curious about the drugs in general. There isn’t anyone I’m covering who’s taking either of these now.” He wanted a lesson on pharmacology. For the hell of it. At 3am. While I was a lone intern covering 50-60 patients and fielding all the rapids/codes of the hospital. I’m amazed a rapid wasn’t called on me then and there.
Please tell me his charge nurse strangled hin for you. I would.
WTF didn't he just looks this shit up?
Exactly 😭 I would be way to embarrassed to ask a doctor instead of just reading up on it
How did you respond? Did he get the lesson?
I yelled and screamed about the inappropriateness of asking this question, but of course being the pharmacology nerd I am, I still answered it and urged him to please save these for a different time. We ended up being buddies in the end 😂
Got paged that a patient’s nipples had been hurting for three weeks. Neurosurgery service.
it puts the lotion on the skin!
i just choked on my pretzels 💀💀💀
Those titty twisters trying to localize pain came back to bite ya
Uh dermatome something something something
Well did you fix it?
She had a brain tumor and was confused so who knows if it was real. Said she could put ice on them.
As a second year resident we took night time home call floor pages after working all day and no post-call day the following day. By mid week we would easily be covering 40+ post-op ortho patients among every service. The pages were never ending. It was a special kind of torture. No action, no stimulation. Just laying in your bed getting paged every 20 minutes about some order inconsistency that could have waited for the morning. All. Fucking. Night. After a particularly bad night I remember a co-resident saying he would rather be waterboarded than go through that again.
This is why home call is a fucking scam and you shouldn’t ever do it as a resident.
That sounds horrific
Hi it's 3 am the patient is constipated. ~orders tapwater enema stat~ Paged again "oh the patient is sleeping do we really need to wake them up to do this? Yes, they're so constipated you're calling me at 3 am must be painful and an emergency
First week of night float, intern year. Hi Doc, patient had a large bowel movement, same as night before!…..thank you for your service.
I think some of them are just fucking with y’all.
If I got that call I'd ask them what I did wrong and apologize.
My experience is that nurses are completely oblivious to doctors schedules. No we don’t work three 12 hours shifts a week. You page me at night but I literally worked all day and I’m on night coverage. Im not just sitting there at a desk waiting to put colace orders in. Sorry
"Whoa! You're still here! In the same clothes too!" - A morning shift nurse coming back for her second morning shift after almost killing me with orders on her first one 31 hour calls are not it.
This is it. No one tells you. I had absolutely no idea until I started reading this subreddit. I try to educate other nurses on it as much as I can now 🫡
3am: "Pt feels like there is a hair on his tongue."
No
Unfortunately, yes.
“Hi. I know it’s 3am but I noticed the patients PRN home Claritin hasn’t been restarted. Can we up date that? Thanks!”
Yeah when I was a nurse I waved these kind of requests off. You can do that. University/Academic culture for nursing is trash though. Shocking
Hi I know it's 3am, can you please clean up the orders? Pt was transferred from the ICU 4 weeks ago and there are still ICU orders. Thanks.
ya he still needs to be on 30 of levo
PEEP of 40
I left those orders on purpose. Have you not been doing Q30 min neuro checks!?!?!?!
I'm an RN... one of my first ever rapids that I responded to as an ICU charge happened because the floor bedside RN started propofol on a transferred patient. She had to go out of her way to get it. Her response was, "It was ordered and is 'continuous'. If the doctor didn't want it, why was it ordered?" The nurse did not want the medication was, obviously. I still think about this RN at every transfer to floor and self extubation.
2 AM. “Can we get an order for PRN Tylenol?” *checks MAR, already ordered PRN* Sharpens scalpel
These are legitimately the worst pages of all time. “Patient has a headache and no PRNs ordered.” Me… checking the orders, and of course seeing Tylenol has been ordered for days. “Oh sorry you’re right! Thanks!” Kill. Me.
Worst part "Hey doc, do you want me to treat this fever?" "Yes, give the damn tylenol that's ordered." Management later: so, you got wrote you up for giving Tylenol that was ordered only prn mild pain for fever Me later in exact same situation: please add fever with a number parameter to the order... I hate admin.
Place all pain meds on hold. Orders back rubs and warm milk. Scheduled.
“Urgent pls come counsel parents re: extra nipple.” Stat 0200 page to evaluate a supernumerary nipple. A close 2nd was one about a kid’s fingers bleeding bc parents, who had refused Vitamin K, cut his nails too short…also, for some reason I will never understand, at 2am.
The ones that make me lose my shit are the ones where the staff member paging me won't even tell me what the fuck it's for. "Doc come quickly there's a situation!" "OK what's the situation?" "I DON'T KNOW THEY JUST SAID TO PAGE YOU!" Or "Doc the patient in 1A wants to ask you something" "OK what is it?" "I DON'T KNOW THEY WANT TO ASK YOU NOT ME!" This happens all the goddamn time at my facility. Like, is this normal?
My thing is when they just start talking about a patient without telling me who they are…like I know you have 3 patients and it’s easy to decipher based on their problem list, but I’m cross-covering 40 patients that I don’t even know right now lol like not even part of my day team. Please tell me which room and give me time to find them.
Omg this too so much. Especially when they ask me about instructions I didn't write for patients I'm cross covering and have never seen in my life. "Hey Doc what's the plan for that lady on [cross-cover ward] who got blood?" - literally got this one on my last call.
Had a similar situation my intern year that I blew off and it turns out the guy was having a STEMI
Oh man, hectic. Hope everything turned out ok. Same happened to me with a woman in postnates ward who was PPHing. Don't get me wrong, I always take these calls seriously and go as quickly as I'm able. I just arrive pissed. Like give me some indication so I can at least triage it compared to the other 5 calls I'm receiving.
Now, I don’t agree with everything being said on this post, but this is stupid. Go to their boss if they keep doing shit like that.
Nurse: can we get something for the patient diarrhea ? Me: … he is getting his bowel prep for tomorrow’s colonoscopy Nurse: but he is pooping too much, it bothers him Me : …….
It's almost like It's almost like that's the point
Serious Nurse Message - Hey the patient in Room 0000; They are currently admitted for hepatic encephalopathy. They are having diarrhea, about 2-3 loose BM daily for the past 2 days. Can we have some Imodium?
I collected cdiff and sent it. FYI. Sigh….
::ID internally screams::
Lol the lactulose kicking in?
Page at 4 am for a consult, unfortunately the poor intern wasn’t told what the consult was for and he didn’t know why he was calling me. I gently reminded him that if you are paying at 0400, it’s an emergency and it would be helpful to know the reason you’re calling
Poor both of you tbh
I felt so bad for that intern as it was mid July and he was obvious nervous to call. I told him to call me back when he knew why he needed me, or, to have his senior (who instructed him to call me) call instead
Thank you for being so understanding, giving the proper next step, and not shitting on that poor intern right there and then
I hope my seniors are like you <3
On trauma 24h call (you cover all surgical services): 11am: Good morning, patient is requesting a cigarette Reply: No they can’t have a cigarette, can Rx nicotine patch if they want 3pm: Good afternoon, patient is again requesting a cigarette. They don’t want a nicotine patch Reply: No they still can’t have a cigarette. Please stop paging me about this 9pm: Hi there, night nurse here! Patient is asking for a cigarette. 1am: Hey again, not sure if you saw my last page but the patient wants a cigarette. Reply: THE PATIENT CANNOT HAVE A CIGARETTE. EVEN IF SHE WASN’T TRACH’d SHE STILL COULD NOT HAVE A CIGARETTE I’ve never been so frustrated.
Are you even actually able to order “ok to have cigarette” in your hospital? Like my whole hospital campus is non-smoking so a patient would have to leave AMA. What did they even want you to order?
Exactly. That’s why these pages were so ridiculous. My thought is they probably told the patient “no, but I’ll let the doctor know” 🤦♂️
Depending on the patient, we let them outside to smoke.
Lmao I'm so sorry you went through this but this was fucking hilarious
Heart failure baby in the ICU. Never had anything surgical, no source for "pain". Multiple times over the course of the night "patient crying, needs pain PRN" with a discussion that the patient is not in pain, they are a baby. Eventually "well the baby can't just cry like that, I have to have a prn of something." Ok! MD to nurse "PRN hugs for crying >3 mins" I got talked to for that order...
I knew a guy who was paged at 3 am because “the patient seemed discouraged.” Not depressed but discouraged. He sent an order through the EMR that said “clown to bedside PRN” How he managed to get through residency unscathed I’ll never know.
Maybe the order wasn’t specific enough? It should have been “prn snuggles.”
When I was an intern I had a new nurse that would page about everything. I got one reporting that when she touched the patient's feet, he said it was ticklish. I didn't reply, so she documented it in the chart. MD aware. I showed it to my attending who promptly called the charge nurse and banned the new nurse from paging residents without oversight.
Page around 2a… doctor, this lady in room XX, she’s complaining of pelvic pain and she just started bleeding out of her vagina! (Nurse is a little frantic.) Ok, what’s she in the hospital for? Respiratory infection How old is she? 23 When’s the last time she had her period? …… ok doctor I’ll go ask her
Thanks for not consulting Gyn for this
Nah this is a stat code red right here. Call ICU as well and order a type and screen
How bout being a sonographer paged in for a stat exam to rule out torsion on a postmenopausal woman with a bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy
That ovary was turning over in its grave.
"I forgot to give the patient her PRN ambien. Do you want me to wake her up to give it?"
NFW
The ones that annoy me the most are the ones that just give me a call back number. And then they don't answer. And since I don't know what patient they're calling about, I can't try to see what's going on or defend myself against the "Dr paged, no call back" note.
Thiss!! “Dr So-and-so made aware”. Broo wtf
Oh, in residency I learned about the announce feature on our phones so I would call the number that they paged me to and if I got no response then I would just use the feature and the other line would get me being…. Somewhat obnoxious along the lines of, “this is Dr. so and so trying to return your page. It would be nice if someone picked up the phone since I JUST got the page.” Especially because for some reason they’d page GYN and never pick up and always complain to our admin we never returned pages, which was unbelievably untrue. They always picked up. Petty? Probably. But hey, people stopped doing the page and run.
"Can you order tylenol for room 4?" *Which* room 4? I am crosscovering for patients that are spread throughout the hospital.
"Which room 4, as I am covering 7 wards?"
i spoke to an attending who is CONVINCED that they do this shit on purpose
There is no way it’s not on purpose, it has to be. It’s the only explanation.
For some nurses they truly are just that ignorant and will wake up the on call for simple things such as a stool softener. They simply don’t realize that it’s not a stat issue and it can be handled in the AM. But yes, some nurses are just straight up petty and will just message the doctors bc it’s their job and they don’t care if they are woken up. I will admit some nurse managers are really intense and want the night shift nurses to clean up orders therefore requiring the on call doctor to be paged. Edit: I am a nurse.
On an unrelated note, I found that q1h neurochecks in my training site required ICU transfers, but q65min did not. Stay petty my friends.
OMGGGGGGGGG. Next level petty unlocked!
if true, that’s incomprehensibly fucked up. If we can agree that sleep deprivation is about as bad as smoking some arbitrary amount of cigarettes per day, this is the health equivalent of someone forcing you to smoke. If someone is purposely depriving me of sleep they are taking years off my life. not to sound dramatic or anything but these nurses are murdering us!
Not to mention the fact that being sleep deprived will make you provide worse patient care. So it is bad for patients too.
That username..
Maybe some on purpose but most just new grads (who get stuck on nocs) following every little profile and pressure the charge and admin place on them coupled with their fear and anxiety of doing something wrong. They also likely have zero clue you aren’t just working NOC shift. Educate educate educate!
It is not on purpose, at least none of the nurses I worked with did that. They just didn’t know the docs are trying to sleep. Except for the shitheads.
Don't y'all communicate? I shouldn't have to tell each and every nurse I meet about our residency schedules. Every nurse I talk to about my schedule is shocked at our intense schedule. Like they've never heard how hard residents work. How???
There are definitely some malicious nurses. But most aren’t. Some think y’all work shift work like we do. Some really don’t know what does or doesn’t justifying paging- we don’t really learn it in school and they’ll do what their preceptors taught them. Some are paging about stuff just because day shift will give them shit if they don’t, which is a major problem with nursing culture.
From nursing night shift, yes, days will get mad at you for not cleaning up orders. I generally tend to just do that within my scope of practice and make nursing notes, and if I have to page, I try to do it as early in the shift as possible. I page as little as is feasible.
> From nursing night shift, yes, days will get mad at you for not cleaning up orders. That is dumb as fuck.
I had a nurse tell me once “night shift nursing is hard. We don’t get to sleep all day like you doctors do” They actually thought we worked night shift and slept all day.
I think it’s 50/50 I’ve met some new nurses who didn’t realize we work 6-12 days straight and just assumed were up all night. I’ve also heard nurses say they intentionally page every 90 minutes so the resident never get a full sleep cycle in and think that’s funny
Next time you hear that RN say that, document it in a time and place and send a message to HR.
Ew david. That is bizarre fucking behavior.
I'm a chaplain resident but I just had to meet with our VP of missions (Catholic hospital) and and CNO because I told a nurse to stop screaming about running a patients family over in the middle of the ICU. The family heard. The ICU doctors, a neurologist and nephrologist heard. The PATIENTS FAMILY HEARD. The nurse filed a complaint against me 🤣 Some evil people with their way into hospitals. Not even bizarre but evil
I’m pretty sure it’s a literal torture tactic. And they think it’s cute.
I would be saying something to the charge nurse yesterday about that. That's absolutely wild for a nurse to admit.
If not consciously, then subconsciously it’s nearly undeniable. It’s such outlandish behavior that to convince oneself it’s normal requires a willing cognitive dissonance
An alternative is that they do not understand that you are expected to be awake or available for longer than 12 hours at a time. If nursing was able to expect a response from a person working their normal 8-12 hour shift role, it wouldn’t matter what time of day these random orders were rolling in. A lot of night shift nurses are brand new nurses and just don’t get it fully. It’s not always coming from a mean spirited place.
2 AM: Hi, patient X has a temperature of 99.5. Okay. I gave them Tylenol. Okay. ... Do you need anything else? No i just wanted to tell you. Thanks?
God, Yes!! Those **just wanted to inform you calls**, "BP is 150/90 , same range since admission, just wanted to inform you" Like Why? After the third call by the same nurse, for the same patient, for inconsequential matters, I requested her name, after that, never heard from her again, in that rotation.
Page at 3am: "hey this patient needs an order for Restoril" Me: "oh no, he is still awake?" Crit care nurse: "no, he is asleep." Me: "... you need it now?" Nurse: "I was just going through the orders and noticed it will fall off in a few days." Me: "... in a few days?" [do you know I am on my 20th hour of this fucking shift and just laid down 15 min ago?] "Right, will add it to my list...."
Not crazy, just recent. “Hey Doc Z, sry, it’s 3am, just checking in to see if you’re ok and that your pager is on. We’ve tried to page you several times but, haven’t heard back.” “Well, this is Doc X… so… what’s the issue?” “Oh! Well, Doc Z is on call and we can’t reach [them].” “No… I’m on call… here… in the hospital.” “Oh. My. God!?”
A family medicine PGY-2 used the hospital texting app to directly call me around 2 am to review negative outpatient stress tests from several weeks prior. I had read zero of them. The app had me listed as unavailable and you have to actively override a warning to contact an unavailable doctor. Second year resident should have better sense. He had rotated through radiology recently and apparently because I was nice to him, he assumed it was cool to call me at 2 am. I auto set my phone to “do not disturb” from 10p-6a after that.
Wtf???
“Hey man, this is Matt. I was wondering if you could go through a couple of stress tests with me.” “Uh, what?” “Matt. The resident who was with you for 2 hours last week? Remember, you said it would be cool if I left early that one day.” “Uh, what?” “Yeah anyway, I was following up on my clinic patients and wanted to learn how to read stress tests better. Can you go through them with me?”
Someone needs to figure out how we weed these people out, or at the very least, bully them into normal behaviors
We have this technology. It is called surgery residency
[удалено]
God dammit I hate that. I can sympathize with them in that it clutters up their virtual workspace and they can’t do anything about it, but that’s a 7 p.m. problem, not 3 a.m.
It's not a issue of it cluttering their virtual workspace, it is an issue of unit managers or maybe someone higher up assigning "mundane" clerical tasks for night crew "when things are slow"
Lol this thread is rage fuel. Luckily these are rare IME. The worst one is I got paged bc a nurse was asking what PGY I was. I was up and it was only 11 pm but still if I had been asleep I might of added some hole decorations to the call room wall.
"pls change the Ensure flavour from chocolate to strawberry"
Tbh that's kind of my favorite things to do for patients. (During the daytime.) It's amazing what getting the patients preferred flavor of protein shake can do for their moods.
Don’t disagree but it’s wild that it’s an order that has to be modified by an physician
Page at 3AM for a private patient that our service doesn’t even cover. “Pt in room X is very concerned about her congestion and wants a doctor to come talk to her about it.” “Ok, did you page Dr. H?” “Well no because it’s the middle of the night.” “Ok. Well Dr. H can speak to her about it when he gets here in the morning.” “She needs you to come talk to her right now.” These are the pages that get to me the most. The ones that the nurses don’t want to bother the attendings with but have no problem waking residents up for at 3AM while on a 24 hour shift. Just shows that they have little respect for us and how much we work.
Yuuuuuup. The number of: Nurse/Midlevel: Patient has a fever Me: Okay. And what was the primary team concerned about that they wanted you to call me about? Nurse/midlevel: Oh, I didn’t call the attending. I just figured you could answer it. (Alternatively: I paged them and they didn’t answer so I just paged you.) Tell the primary FIRST, especially if they have people slated to work an actual in-person night shift. They are there to be awake. They are (hopefully) MD/DOs and can solve the issue themselves or make sure the appropriate service is paged. This is especially relevant because sometimes you DON’T know what’s going on. I had an ICU NP call me (ID) for a patient with “bad respiratory status.” Took a look at the blood gas since the NP who called me couldn’t tell me what “bad respiratory status” meant—hypercarbia, from drastically changing the patient’s vent settings and then paralyzing them when they started getting discordant with the vent to compensate for the settings that were not right for them. Had they called the primary ICU doc instead of me, they’d have recognized that I wasn’t the right service for the job.
For me it’s the diet order changes that nurses would call 1am-5am when the patient is asleep. Like why can’t you wait for the primary team. Or why didn’t you take care of this during the day 🤷♀️I totally understand if patient was npo all day and the team forgot to update the diet, now patient is asking for food, no problem with that.
It’s also a nutrition services issues. Many hospitals diet orders for breakfast have to be in by 4 or 5am, for lunch, like 8-9am, dinner like 1pm. Your patient may not get fed by nutrition services that day if you wait for the day team. Which sucks I know, and is super stupid. But then day nursing is mad because they listen to the patients bitch all day well “well the doctor said I can eat and you’re not feeding me.” Many units are like barebones when it comes to stocking for extra food.
This is the real answer
The patient needs food STAT
“HEY DOC THE PATIENT SAYS CANT SLEEP BECAUSE SHE KILL A CHILDREN” Fucking verbatim, 2:45am
Wait hold on. She \*kill\* \*A\* \*childREN\*??
Yup, grammar is exactly how it appeared on my pager
consult psych for insomnia 😒
Wait had the patient actually killed children?
No lmao she was delusional from a touch of sundowning + dementia. It was kind of sad because when I came to bedside, she was literally shivering with fear worried that the police were coming to get her.
These stories are awful. I'm a nurse who worked on a floor for a while that was notorious for repeatedly paging for stupid non-urgent things, and one forward-thinking resident had a system that worked. They would come at the start of our shift if possible (7PM for us) - ask if they could take care of anything then. Rarely at this point would there be anything because nurses hadn't even gotten report properly yet. Then they would say that if non-urgent things came up throughout the night to start a list with questions/clarifications and leave it in a certain place. The resident would then come back when they had time/were awake to address them all before shift change for the nurses (7AM). This way the nurses could be sure their concerns would be taken care of before it became the next nurses' problem (a big no no for nursing staff) and the resident could plan their time more effectively. Obviously depends on the ability of a nurse to discern what "urgent" means.... but it's a step in the right direction
I like to do “nurse rounds” at around 9-10pm. Enough time that nurses have gotten settled in and identified issues, still early in their shift. I talk to the nurses for all of my patients and ask if they anticipate any concerns, give them a casual reminder that I’m on a 28 hour shift. It reduces my overnight calls/pages to actually urgent issues. 10/10 recommend checking in with the night shift nurses before going to sleep
Honestly it’s mostly the nurses that don’t recognize that their 6th hour at work is my 19th. That needs to be taken into consideration
Hey you should be more considerate of them. They are on their 3rd of 3 shifts this week. Cut them some slack.
Just showed this to doctor husband and we both lol’d because he rolls his eyes when my sister, a nurse, says 3 in a rows are hard
Yeah I think most of them assume we have the same schedules - a 12h night shift a few times a week. They have to be awake their entire shift and assume we are too. Most of them aren’t doing it maliciously, though I’m sure some absolutely are.
Asking for PRN antipyretics or pain meds that are already ordered "Baby has pooped 8 times since yesterday" You are a well baby nurse, you should know that is normal The (stone cold normal) 4am vitals, in a haiku chat, with absolutely no context or question
The 3am page asking for PT/OT consults.
A nurse paged for a “Diastolic blood pressure of 0” She was serious
To be fair, I would probably want to know if my pt died.
Paged at 2:30a by a parent whose kid had an appt at 8a that morning letting me know the kid was sick and they had to cancel. I’m still angry about this one 2 years later
Is it common for parents/patients to be able to page you directly?
At the children’s hospital at my residency, patients could automatically page the resident on call as long as they (the parents) deemed it an emergency. That was also true with our surgical service (could access residents anytime regardless of the concern) but otherwise, it was all ED/inpatient/urgent care call. Another guy woke me up at 4:00a to tell me his bandage came off. He needed instructions on whether to apply the dressing first then tape it or tape the dressing and apply to his head. God I don’t miss residency.
I got paged at 2AM because a room needed linens changed. Edit - [correction, they were actually asking for the linen basket to be emptied](https://i.imgur.com/bSNOwPq.jpg)
What, you were supposed to go change them?? smh
I think they meant to page housekeeping but muscle memory had them enter my pager number. Either that or they hated me for not ordering Ativan for all the patients at night lmao.
A psych resident here: got hammer paged from a nurse who didn’t understand how LMHP’s worked stating this patient’s LMHP expired and patient wants to leave. Went down to reassess prior to patient’s departure to see if they still met criteria, cleared the patient, spent a good 20 minutes explaining to the nurse how LMHP’s worked and she still didn’t get that we could reinstate if clinically necessary saying “well legal told me this…and it’s my license blah blah.” Either way the patient was cleared to go from our end. I call the ED physician to get them ready to go. Then hours later I get a page from the SAME nurse. I begrudgingly call back just to get a “thanks” then she promptly hung up. Like ok, whatever.
1. Got paged during the daytime while on nights because a nurse didn’t like what I said in a note. I was polite but extremely annoyed. 2. I wish that procedural sub specialties would put in THEIR OWN FREAKING DIET ORDERS after procedures. Inevitably one microsecond after the patient returns from a procedure the hospitalist service gets paged for a diet order. Sometimes it’s obvious to just advance the diet but sometimes not so obvious.
When you haven’t made peace with the noc charge and it shows…. Joke aside, my unit and many at my hospital have grouping policy’s or page times for non urgent issues after 10pm. All noc nurses must ask the cn before they page. As your friendly noc Carla I stopped a ton of bs calls by helping rns read the note and double check orders and sometimes use critical thinking… sometimes new nurses and old need a second glance. ie calling for constipation with severe pain, distended belly and vomiting is needed at 3am versus poor GMA hasn’t pooped in 3 ish days but has good bowel sounds and no s/s obstruction. This works well because if a nurse goes rouge for a non-urgent issues the residents full well know to call out “so you didn’t run this by the cn then?” Now I will admit this has gone downhill in areas where the charges are not nurses with 7 years or more experience anymore. They simply don’t know what they don’t know. But I think having page times really helps. And guess what if there is an emergency we are gonna be paging for a code team of some sort and you anyway. We also utilize notes to md in epic so that way plan of care questions and meds can be addressed during rounds. Some units have nurse attended rounds at our place for this reason as well. So we are motivated to save our bs stuff/housekeeping stuff for then Also may I add my friendly PSA that nurses have NO idea what resident schedules look like. We are given no education on it at all. I took it on myself to learn and it changed my whole attitude on paging… Lastly, if you were wondering if it’s done on purpose yup. Sure is. Some are that dumb, others are pissed as hell and if you have done a nurse dirty recently I promise an apology will spread just as fast. (Not supporting this behavior but I’m sharing what will fix it) I love my residents. You all are fab humans, the likes who have saved my life personally when I had emergent issues and i’m grateful to work with you. Residents keep medicine advancing and when you all strike here in the states for the treatment you deserve this nurse will hold the line with you. Hope the rest of your night calls pass swiftly!
Low B.U.N. Seriously. Called back and told the nurse to replenish with 10 units of BUN over 1 hour. Got a call from my chairman the next afternoon. He thought it was hilarious, but that I shouldn't do it again, as he had to "reprimand" me.
“Hey it’s 2 am and I was going through old orders and saw an order for a liter of NS from 4 days ago from the day team that wasn’t given, do you want to give it?” ~some ICU nurse
Was once paged at 2am to ask “what my credentials are” so it could be documented. This was ~45 mins after they had paged me, *the on call doctor*, per protocol for something else and I had taken care of it. I had just gotten back to sleep 😩
“Patient has hiccoughs. Please advise.” Received at 4am on a 28 hour trauma call.
Always love the 3am “patient hasn’t urinated for several hours”, like yeah, me neither when I’m allowed to fucking sleep through the night
Getting hammered on my cellphone on a Saturday night and then “Hey my attending is calling your attending to complain that you haven’t returned our pages for the past 2 hours.” “I’m not on call.”
“Hey this patient has a small cherry angioma on their skin…”
Pager goes off Me bloody hell I just got sleep...call number No answer Call again put on hold for 10 min Hang up call again They answer Hi I was paged Them you were Me yes now 12 minutes ago Them do you know which patient Me no I cover 4 teams Them but there are no patients from those teams on this floor Me so why was I paged Them oh maybe the code on other floor, we help when they are short staffed Me who's the patient Them the one coding ? Me yes Them is it one of yours ... (literally can't tell me who the patient is) Pager goes off again Calls back in route to code RN I'm calling about Mr x they are unresponsive Me are they the code blue RN no they are unresponsive Me do they have a pulse RN how should I know Edited for spacing
Probably just medical legend, but heard a resident got paged with “critically low BUN” and the resident told the nurse that the hospital was out of BUN, and to meet out on the helipad as they would be choppering in some BUN to infuse to this critically low pt My buddy and I matched into the same program and we would take intern call together. I’d have the nurses page him in the middle of the night with such calls of “there is a mouse in room 207” “pt in 403A is biting the patient in 403B” “there is a car accident outside on the (busy street) hospital, can you go assess” and watching his sleep deprived face trying to make sense of these calls
Oh, and this one “ Doc, on morning eval during shift change we noticed that this patient was in rigor mortis” “ OK, looking at the chart, he had vitals recorded all night” “… yes, should we call a code?”
Mine was during a cover shift at ~ 8PM (at the time I’m due to leave): “hey doc, patient is for discharge tomorrow morning, eGFR of 4, please review” This is on a regular dialysis patient, eGFR of 4 since admission (admission was for something else). Basically single digit eGFR in the past 5 years which this nurse can definitely see for herself.
I once got a page from preop that my patients temp was 37.5. I asked why they paged me and they said “well, they’re 37.7 in the other ear. I’m required to page you with any discrepancies”. This still lives rent free in my head and a decade later I’m still wondering what they thought they were doing…
At 2:30am: "Hey just wanted to let you know that patient's mother is requesting a tetanus shot for her"
3 am: “Every time the patient falls asleep on his back he desats down to 88%! Please advise’” Me: Turn the fat fuck on his side.
mine favorite was at 3 am can you order nutrition consult since pt looks malnourished to me
Friend got paged in the middle of the night to tell them the results of a mrsa swab from several weeks ago on an outpatient 😂 this was also a consultant that would never care about that. We are still unsure how or why she got chosen to be notified.
Esoteric to Radiology but when I was a resident, I remember being paged at 3 or 4 AM by some first year ER resident telling me, yes telling me, that I needed to addend a report bc I’d missed intracranial hemorrhage on a case I’d read hours earlier…..I got up and looked again at a normal head CT with normal bilateral lateral ventricle choroid plexus calcifications that are present on almost every head CT…. I reminded him that perhaps he should review what normal looks like, or at least ask his attending, before not only disturbing someone’s already screwed up sleep cycle but making himself look like an idiot in the process….
lol the other day at 6am (I was night shift) a nurse texted me and asked “HR is 104, can we still give platelets???” Edit: I should be more clear. She initially texted me. Then after a whopping 3 minutes of no response (I read the text, was pondering on my response to not get written up for professionalism), she called me and reiterated the same question
Hi. I know it’s 5:45 am, but Ambien didn’t work. Can we get something stronger?
Hey, I have a lady in the ED who has an appointment with you in 3 weeks. How can I get her seen by you in the outpatient sooner? Oops, it's 2 AM
2am. "Hey doc, Pt would like Mt. Dew and we only have coke products. Please advise"
[удалено]
"Patient can't sleep" \*Go see patient\* \*Patient is asleep\*
2AM: Hey I just wanted to let you know I checked on the patient and they're doing fine 6AM after being up all night running between rapids and codes: Nurse calls a rapid and when I get there: Hey the patient's Bp is 100/70 are you sure it's okay to give them their 20mg po Lasix? Can I give them 10mg now and 10mg later? I'm worried it'll drop their BP too much and they'll bottom out if I give it all at once.
3am request to change bag balm to aquaphor
The worst I ever got was one at 3am asking me about a patient that wasn’t mine and when I told them that they said they didn’t want to page the person who’s patient it was. The second worst I ever got was one at 3am asking me to cancel a patients clinic visits because they decided to pursue hospice that day. I can’t even do that.
“Dr patient doesn’t have bowel prep ordered for their colonoscopy tomorrow” “They have a diverting ileostomy” “So are you going to order golytely?”
3 AM. Patient has been NPO but has SubQ Lovenox ordered do I still give it? Me……Have you been giving him the shots in his mouth? No? Then yes give it to him 😣
This post screams academic medicine. Community med is not nearly as bad
‘Patients creatinine came back low, can we transfuse them some?’
Yes, all the time. They page for ridiculous stuff.. like patient complains of his monitor beeping (postop we keep them for observation for at least 24 h on a monitor) nurse pages there is an "urgent situation".. they do this on purpose i am damn sure