The surgery routine

The early-morning routine:

0415: Wake up
0415-0440: Get dressed in clean scrubs borrowed from the hospital.
0420-0440: Eat a quick bowl of Cheerios and otherwise get ready.
0440-0445: Drive to the hospital.
0445-0530: Pre-round on 2-3 patients.
0530-0700: Rounds.
0700-0800: Morning lecture (Tu-Fr).

Mornings and afternoons:

My time after 0800 is surprisingly unstructured. Medical students are expected to sign up for surgeries in the mornings. In the afternoons, I tend to either sign up for another surgery, if there's something interesting scheduled, or find my intern and try (not always successfully) to make myself useful. On non-call days, I've been leaving the hospital around 1700-1800.

Evenings:

I grab dinner on the way home and watch some Daily Show or Family Guy while eating. Then I try to get some studying in before crashing. I shower at night, now, to speed up the early-morning routine. My entire schedule has shifted up a few hours so that I'm going to sleep between 2100-2200 for an average of 6.5 hours of sleep per night.

The on-call routine:

When I'm on call, the schedule is exactly the same except that I go to sign-out (when the day team hands off patients to the night team) at 1700. Then I tag along with the mid-level resident for the rest of the night doing things like putting in arterial lines and consulting on Emergency Department patients who might be surgery admissions.

This doesn't last all night. In the two times I've taken call so far, I slept for 5 hours and 4 hours. In contrast, my classmate got slammed with a busy Saturday night and only slept for 2 hours. It's really hit-or-miss.

Post-call:

On post-call days, I get to go home after morning conference and after I finish writing my progress notes. That's the end of a 28-hour work day. I head straight to bed and sleep for a couple hours, then I have the rest of the day free to relax, go for a run, write in my blog, and take care of chores like laundry and grocery shopping.