Whoever said that a full moon doesn’t affect the intensity of your workday if you are employed in the medical field has obviously never worked in the medical field. At my current job at a major trauma hospital, this event came and bit me in the ass, and I didn’t even realize I was being played until 11 that night when I was in my third emergent OR case of the day. I was on call on Saturday, which is an anxiety-ridden time in itself, but I knew about the first case of the day which had been planned out for us to come in at eight in the morning on Saturday. Not exactly my favorite way to wake up on a weekend, to have to go straight into work, but I would rather have these planned cases than be woken up in the middle of the night by my phone ringing out the Beatles’ “Help!” before having to make myself look semi-presentable in my sleep-deprived state to get to the hospital in a 30-minute time frame.
*I really did myself a disservice choosing that song as my alarm. When I first assigned that ringtone to that dastardly phone number, I thought I was being ironic and cute considering the name of the song, but now I can’t hear that song on any playlist or on the radio without a moment of panic and a painful shot of adrenaline rushing through my body at warp speed for a sum total of two seconds before I realize I’m not being summoned to fulfill my oath. You think I would have learned from my mistake of having the Overture to Phantom of the Opera as my morning alarm when I was in high school, but I digress.*
The 8 a.m. case went ahead about as smoothly as you can imagine, and I was back in bed by 9:15….for a sum total of ten minutes, then came a text saying we had another case and they’re ready to do it now. “Alright fine,” I thought as I begrudgingly put my bra back on and redid my ponytail before putting my scrubs back on and getting back in my car. The interior of the car was still cool from the AC that had been blowing on my ride back home, and this is Texas so that residual coolness doesn’t last long in a car, even on a temperate day. The second case went fine, but by the time it was done, it was definitely close to lunch time and I told the hubby I would pick him up from home so we could go get lunch at his suggestion that morning. Something in my gut told me this was going to be a bad idea, but I’m a sucker for ramen and we were going to try out a restaurant that we’d never been to before. My anxiety for the day was still high but I was hoping this would help calm my nerves even though I was wearing my scrubs inside the restaurant because you never know when you might need to make a quick getaway. No sooner had we been seated and were perusing the menu when “Help!” blared out of my phone and resounded everywhere in the restaurant. I said a few choice words before getting up to dash out the door, leaving my husband to order his food and deliver my order for what I would want to eat later. I didn’t even get a chance to order a glass of water before I had to whisk myself away. Fast forward two hours and I’m back at the restaurant to pick up my husband where he waited for me with a bag of takeout in his hand.
When we arrived back home, I warmed up my deconstructed ingredients and put them together in a big bowl that I managed to slurp down without burning my mouth, although the temperature and spice level did it’s darndest to start a fire in my mouth. I was finally feeling ok, especially for the five hours it took us to finish the current season of a TV show that we’d been meaning to watch for a while. When the credits started rolling on the final episode though, the Beatles rang out again in my living room. I just rolled my eyes and started to put myself together again, though I kinda knew that this was a distinct possibility on the horizon when we could have done the case earlier, but the ordering doctor decided to wait and see if the patient got better. News flash, he got worse.
When I stepped back into that same OR room, the same nurses were there from the early afternoon case, and we all said our greetings to each other before laughing about seeing too much of each other that day. The case was going well enough, as far as emergency OR cases go, and I was looking forward to a comforting shower when I got home, when about halfway through the case, one of the trauma team members came up and said “You’re all going to hate me, but we have another code after this one.” I’m not kidding when I say a collective groan arose out of everyone’s throats and it must have sounded like a herd of disgruntled buffalo in that hospital for a second. Luckily, we had a team who could get our other trauma OR room ready while we finished with the current patient so we just jumped from one room to the other when it was all said and done. The last case of the night wasn’t overly hectic either, just time-consuming, and by this point, everyone is looking a little bleary-eyed. When we were doing our charting and getting the patient out of the room, we just all shook our heads and said “See you Monday.” No way was anyone wanting to do anymore cases for the weekend. While we were finishing that case, I had a moment of time to do a little research on my phone and wouldn’t you know it, the moon phase for that night said 100% full. I vocalized my findings out loud in the OR and everyone pretty much said “Ohhhhhhhhhh. That explains everything.” Those of us in the medical field are our own breed of interesting, some departments more than others. But, at the end of the day, or night in some cases, I’m pretty sure the majority of us can all agree that full moons can be a bitch for all of us. I love the moon, but she can definitely test your limits.
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