BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION TURNED FREAKISH

You know how I put out a post yesterday saying how being on call on my birthday wouldn't be a deterrent to my having a little fun? Well it was a huge deterrent and I have no fun at all, well at least not the way I thought would anyway. So I arrive work at 8am and close at 5pm, dash home for some refreshment and was back at the Hospital in another 3 hours. As I drove into the premises still carrying my overnight luggage, a colleague of mine walks up to me and says "there is a preterm neonate in the special care baby unit (SCBU) who just developed NEC - necrotising enterocolitis and also having occasional apneic attacks, please review". And I thought "ok here we go, it's begun". I am in the scbu and  the labour ward unit calls, they have lots of patients for review; some in labour and others with elevated blood pressure, still I thought "nothing I couldn't handle". I reviewed one of the patients in labour and realised her baby was in distress. She had to be prepared for an emergency caesarian section. 

We are in the middle of the preparation when another pregnant woman walks into the labour ward bleeding profusely per vagina. This also meant back-to-back surgeries in the middle of the night. NOW, I'm between the devil and the deep blue sea but not for long because of course the bleeding woman goes into surgery first. That surgery went from an emergency CS to an almost hysterectomy because after the baby was delivered we found that not only was the placenta low lying, it was morbidly adherent to the walls of the uterus (placenta accreta), leading to continuous excessive bleeding. However, after much battling, the bleeding stopped and we had a healthy mother and baby. The first case is over at 2am and we move in for the second which was over at 3am. 

Post - op, I check on the preterm baby and he's doing ok and I finally try to catch some sleep at almost 5am. I wake up and have to be ready for the day's work before 8am. Literally, I had a freakishly bloody call. In all, even though I didn't get to have any of the kind of fun I'd have hope for and I am bone-tired right now, I'm still glad I got to save some lives. Afterall, being a medical doctor is my number 1 passion.