Today, at 5pm, I handed in my pager to the hospital switchboard so they can redistribute it to someone else. It felt weird - giving up the way I am contacted in hospital ... like giving up work. Why? I'm going away for a holiday. Three weeks away. Visiting Singapore, Malaysia, Holland and England. Time to spend away from work. Time to visit friends, family and girls I have not seen for a long time.
Even after turning in my pager, I ended up back in the wards, fixing up little things before I left - though I was knew I could not be paged, I could not overcome the feeling that I was leaving something undone which should have been done. Were there any tests that I should have requested/ordered for any patients over the weekend? Were any medication charts left filled incorrectly? Did I leave behind anything treatable that I forgot to treat? Was anyone going to die because of my folly? There was going to be no opportunity to fix the problem next week - I could only hope that the team taking over will figure everything out and make sure everything is fine.
I'm sure my patients will not die. Well, most of them, anyway. One might. He was whisked away to the ICU from th Emergency Department because he was that sick, so he was never really my responsibility ...
One thing that the E2 node tracker at cowofdoom.com told me today was that my writeup on It's better to have loved and lost... has been voted on (and presumably, read). The last time I got a good answer to this question, it was from a 14 year old girl from a couple of lifetimes ago. It's been about 6 years since I last saw her in person but we'll be crossing paths again in one week's time - somewhere far, far away from where I saw her and certainly under a very different situation from that I could have then imagined.