The Doctor Diaries

Make the Beeping Stop

"Paging Dr. Walker, paging Dr. Walker, please report to emergency room A," a staticky voice echoed down the hallway.

My head snapped up as I glanced around the room, panicking as I took in my surroundings. The computer screen in front of me mocking me with a "timed-out due to inactivity" message, the phone next to it off the hook but silent - a sure sign that I had fallen asleep while dictating. Again.

"Paging Dr. Walker, paging Dr. Walker, please report to emergency room A," the ominous voice in the sky repeated.

Shit. That's me. Why are they calling me overhead? I look down at the tiny black box of doom otherwise known as my pager and press the green button. 6 missed pages in the last 5 minutes - all from the emergency room. Double shit. How long had I dozed off for?

I stand up and bolt out of the resident room after doing a quick drool-check on the small mirror on the back of the door. "No sir, I did not fall asleep midway thru my description of Mr. Smith's X-ray findings," my excuse already brewing in my mind. "I was clearly very busy taking care of yet another medical emergency and simply could not return your page any sooner." Rule number one of residency: always answer your pager. Failure to do so will result in your name being screeched out of the PA system as a glaring indicator to the entire hospital that you are pissing someone off.

I've had fantasies about that scene in Office Space. The one where they all are out in some field, smashing a fax machine with baseball bats and crow bars to 'Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangsta.' I feel their pain. Except my angst comes in the form of a tiny beeping rectangle.

I remember back to my middle school days when having a pager meant you were just so cool. There was Kellie - the queen of the 7th grade - with her bedazzled pink pager with its Hello Kitty charm getting 143 and 01134 pages from her boyfriend of the day. I was so jealous back then. If I only knew then what I know now. How that little black box would be the bane of my existence. Too bad, like everything else in my life, I had arrived to the cool-kids party about a decade too late.

All those hours in the library spent working towards getting into the right college, then the right med school and finally into residency and here I was, in the 22nd grade (yes - still in theoretical "school" all these years later), tethered to my significantly less-blinged out pager while the Kellies' of the world had long ago moved on.

Of course, I'm not jealous or bitter because I 'save lives for a living' and 'make a difference in the world' or whatever other bullshit line I've been fed over the years as to why it's OK that I'm 28 years old, have more debt than a small nation and make $12.50 an hour. (Sadly I've done the math - a $50k annual salary is crap when you're working 80 hours a week.)

But as the good Dr. Coobs would say "G, could you honestly picture yourself doing anything else?" Any the truth is, I can't. I, Gemma Walker, was born to be an Orthopaedic surgeon. I love piecing together broken bones and watching patients get their lives back. I just sometimes wish 2am trauma calls could be rescheduled to a more comfortable hour.

Ben and I met the first day of our internship. I'll never forget his opening line: "Hi! I'm Ben Coobs. Coobs like boobs but with a C." From that day on, he had been branded with the nickname he had unconsciously given himself, Dr. Boobs. Ben and I became instant friends. How could we not? We both understood that the key to residency was sticking together. Sure, you could be a selfish prick and only look out for yourself but life is just so much easier when you have a person who likes you enough to cover for you when you over sleep your nap alarm after a bad call night.

"Beep beep beep. Beep beep beep. Beep beep-" the shrill of my pager broke through my thoughts as I rushed into the emergency room struggling to press the silence button.

"I'm here! Please just make the beeping stop already!" I mutter under my breath as I join the crowd that has surrounded the latest polytrauma victim. The nurse closest to the door glares at me, clearly not impressed with my grumbling. As I make my way to the foot of the bed, I finally get a glimpse of what the incessant paging was all about. There, on the gurney is one of the more dramatic cases I've seen recently. A young man (I think, but it's really hard to tell with all the blood) with lines coming out of every extremity and a leg clearly mangled and angled in an unnatural direction, is fighting for his life. And boy, was it going to be a fight. The heart monitor was beeping erratically as he went into an arrhythmia causing the trauma team surrounding his limp body to go into overdrive. Fluids are forced in, medications are drawn and defibrillator pads are at the ready.

And then, the beeping stopped. And I hoped that for the man's sake, it would start again.