How Were Your 28-Hour-Long Shifts At Hospitals During Your Medical Residency? How Did You Survive?

How were your 28-hour-long shifts at hospitals during your medical residency? How did you survive that?



This question was originally posted on Quora.com and was answered by Lacy Windham, studied at University of Tennessee Health Science Center



They weren't 28 hour shifts, they were 30 hour shifts. (Sidenote: residents are called residents because they literally lived at the hospital in the past.)

We survived it because we had to. Occasionally, when things were calm, we would take turns having a nap which was extremely helpful. If we weren’t able to get a nap, then we went to sleep as soon as we got home and tried to do this in such a way that it didn’t disrupt our normal sleep patterns. For example, I would only sleep a couple of hours during the daytime and then stay up and sleep again at night to try to stay within a normal pattern.

Sleep deprivation is a very real thing. It’s foolish to think we were at our best mentally and physically at the end of those shifts.

One of my fellow residents drove home and fell asleep in her driveway with the car running for many hours. If she had pulled into her garage, maybe she would’ve died.

Another resident fell asleep while she was driving home and crossed a median and hit a curb.

I remember leaving a 30 hour shift, and after making it out of the parking garage successfully I managed to run over an orange traffic cone that was blocking one of the exits.

The man who collected tickets at the parking exit was yelling at me to get off of the cone, and in my confusion and decreased motor skills I only succeeded in pulling forward and backwards multiple times over that cone flattening it into oblivion.

The guy was really mad, as if I was doing it on purpose, and it didn’t help that I was laughing hysterically about it.

But 20 minutes earlier, I was probably performing a cesarean delivery or laparoscopy for a ruptured ectopic. Do we really think that’s a good idea?

Many of the arguments about ending these long shifts involve ‘continuity of care’ for patients and a concern that residents might miss out on educational cases. My personal experience was that many attendings didn’t really like to operate in the middle of the night anyway, and would leave non-emergent cases for the daytime teams. I don’t think the risk of these long hours is worth the handful of cases that might not be seen.

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