Call rooms I have known

I’m a young Jamie Lee Curtis right now (minus the good looks, perky boobs, and that XY chromosome thing). This is because I write you from a call room that is directly out of a horror movie. No, really. I find the fact that the door has no lock extremely disconcerting. I’m just waiting to be attacked.

This is not the first weird Call Room I Have Known. I, like every doctor (with the exception of dermatologists and psychiatrists), have a colorful call room history. My very first call room, back where I went to medical school, was at the VA (It always comes back to the VA, doesn’t it?). I shared the room with another subintern. The place was incredibly dingy, with peeling paint and a dirty window that didn’t open. There was a bathroom with a tiny doorway (the width of my shoulders) and no working sink. The beds were cots that had no firm edge, so the sunken part in the middle could cause a person to slide right off the mattress. Worse, the room was directly next door to the room of a patient with borderline personality disorder. Every single nursing home in the state had refused him because he was too demanding. (At some point during my month, I decided to personally try to convince facilities to take him. It was hopeless, though: Case managers would actually hang up on me when they heard his name.) He ended up living and, months later, dying at the VA. The month I was there, though, he was still in full swing. We spent our nights listening to him ring his call bell every five minutes. Fun. Even more fun for the nurse. Note I do not use the plural form of the word “nurse.” There was only one nurse covering the ward overnight.

Since then, I've spent countless nights with one ear to the door and the other to the pager, including one month in VA call room so isolated and dark that there was a giant bolt on the door. Outside of the ICU in the hospital where I did residency, I spent my nights in a memorable place known as the “hook up” call room. The origin of the nickname? It was a single and its proximity to the elevator gave visitors the opportunity for discretion. (Note: I didn’t take advantage of this option, but readers, you know who you are.)

More recently, I’ve stayed at the VA in my new town. I hate to sleep in a room where I see roaches on a regular basis, but usually by the time I get there I’m so tired that I don’t care.

Surprisingly, the place where I'm working tonight, a rapidly expanding acute care facility, beats all of these by a mile. The “rapidly expanding facility” thing is the cause of the problem. The original call room was a patient room, complete with a phone and television and DVD player. The sound of the patient monitors and beeping IV machines was kind of annoying, but the room was clean and relatively pleasant, anyway. (I recently read this very funny nurse’s blog with the title “Somewhere, an IV alarm is beeping.” Isn’t it true?) Then, the last time I worked here, that room had been filled with a PEGd/Trachd patient, and so we on-call doctors were moved to an occupational therapy training room. It was a miniature apartment, but the appliances weren’t real. And the bed was a giant queen bed that appeared to be one of those store displays for comforters. It looked good, but try to sit (or worse, sleep) in it. And then there were the sheets. I think they’d been occupied by someone other than the occupational therapy patients. It appeared that there was a recent recreational situation in what was clearly supposed to be an occupational situation room. Gross.

Which brings me here. The OT suite again belongs to the OT patients and the randy employees, so I am instead on the 2nd floor of the building. It is a former hospice ward that is being remodeled. All the rooms are empty. The nurses’ station has been ripped apart. Everything is in disarray. Furniture, barrels of trash, horrible framed artwork, and strange medical machines line the hallways haphazardly. Old computers and other pieces of office machinery, all covered in plastic, lurk everywhere. Then, in the middle of this, there are some horror-film-type-things, like a telemetry monitor that’s been left on and is just showing a flatline, or a functioning security screen showing a real-time picture of what appears to be the front of the building. Even the room I’m staying in has random medical machinery and supplies in it: an adult scooter called “Sidekick,” stacks of linens, a suction machine, computer monitors, 14 whiteboards, an extra TV. Note: Do NOT see the movie Session 9. It’s an incredibly scary movie about an abandoned state mental hospital. If you have seen it, though, you understand the level of creep I allude to when I say that I feel like I’m spending the night in “Session 9.” I am totally freaked out. It would be OK if I could watch a DVD, but I only have basic cable. I’m not sure what happened to the DVD player. My television choices are either Spanish soap operas or QVC.

I went up to the ward to try to explain my situation, but I sounded like a lunatic “Former hospice, furniture everywhere, strange machinery, security camera, plastic wrap. It’s how they picture death in the movies!” I got laughed at. And then, can you believe it, the nurses went back to WORK and didn't even sympathize with my lack of a DVD player!

So, readers, think of me as you sleep in your own beds tonight. Hope that I live to see another day. And also that they don't call me and I actually get some sleep.