Beep beep beep beep

I don't get paged much too often during this rotation, certainly not on the scale of my internal medicine back in clerkship (over a year ago, although the memories are fresh - excepting anything useful). The sound of a pager will always make me jump. I think if a med student/resident was in a coma, the one sound that would wake them up is the almighty annoying pager's terrifyingly high pitched beeeeep beeeep beeeeep. The one sound that haunts all our dreams, and often wakes us up from dreams.

I remember my first night holding the team pager, I broke into a cold sweat every time it went off. This is with a resident who backed me for every patient since I couldn't give orders. I also remember sitting up in the middle of sleep on internal medicine. Poor captain was just playing around on his phone in bed. Apparently I sat up, turned to him and very angrily demanded the team pager. And then I asked him 'Dopamine? Why not L-dopa?" Note that I literally have never prescribed either of those medications, and can't do neurology to save my - or anyone elses' - life.  Then I wanted him to report on a patient he rounded on. I was asleep through this entire exchange.

Another memorable page was towards the end of our internal rotation (do you see a pattern here?), when it was my best friend's birthday. One of our mutual friends snuck a cake into our on call lounge. Literally the second she leaned down to blow the candle we got a level 1 alert page. I.E. Run for someone's life. We left the candle burning and our friend sitting while we ran. Yes she got to blow out the candle 2 hours later when we lit it again.

My scariest yet most adrenaline pounding page was, again, internal medicine. At about 4AM (I remember staring at the clock in disbelief), doing my 5th consult of the night, working non stop since 8AM that morning, and consulting the most boring patient. Boring patient is good patient. They're standard, easy to treat, but hard to stay awake for. Just a presurgical consult for someone with a minor problem. Why this couldn't wait until the morning (still many days before her OR) I can't figure out. A whole room of residents and med students, all walking zombies. Then, breaking the silence of keyboards and pens scratching papers, the ear splitting shrill of 5 pagers all going off at once.

Only one thing triggers all our pagers at once (except an alarm test), and followed by immediate overhead alarms blaring: CODE BLUE. CODE BLUE. WING X. REPEAT. CODE BLUE.

A patient has crashed. Heart stopped. A split second where we all turn from our screens to stare at each other, then chairs being knocked over and flying as we all rush out the room at once. In front of us security is directing the way, nurses waving their arms like plane runway attendants flagging us down hallways.

You forget how out of shape you are, that you haven't eaten since 2PM lunch that day, that you haven't slept in who knows how many hours. It's a dead run and the moment you tumble into the room, jump on the patient's chest and start CPR. Only when you're switched out from compressions do you realize how out of breath you are.

That patient in particular didn't make it, but a lot of patients don't when they code. That was one patient who would have never survived a code either way, due to age and comorbid diseases.

Every time the pager rings, or anything that sounds remotely like it, I have an automatic reaction to slap my chest and hips at the same time - where I normally carry my pager. I look like a maniac wildly groping and slapping myself in public unfortunately. I've seen a few people give me sympathetic glances. I assume they're also losing sleep to pages.