I survived my first night on call. Last night, the team on call was myself, another intern, and a third-year resident, covering two inpatient floors (around 55-60 patients). I had 15 oncology kids on my service alone, and some of them were pretty sick — almost all of them are in for in-house chemotherapy, and unsurprisingly, kids can get very sick while receiving drugs that are designed to kill cells. Nonetheless, by the end of the night, I felt pretty confident that I could handle the minor issues, make educated decisions about the moderate ones, and identify the major ones that needed me to page the third-year. And our third-year actually was able to catch about an hour of sleep, which she told us was solely because she got to trust our decisionmaking abilities by the end of the shift. (That made me pretty happy.)

Of course, when I rolled in the door today, I immediately crashed in bed… and didn’t wake up until around 9:00 PM. A little dinner, a little baseball on TV, and I’m turning in again. If I owe you email, I apologize; I’m off this weekend, and will try to catch back up.

(Before I crash, though, I wanted to point to Sotheby’s page on the copy of the Declaration of Independence sold for $8.1 million. This is the famous copy of the Declaration that was found at a flea market in 1989; I like this mostly because of the cool Java image viewer that Sotheby’s has on most every auction page.