Sleepy Head

One of the nephrologists is a  notoriously sound sleeper and wakes up very, very slowly.  So when he’s on-call you can pretty much ask for whatever you want and he’ll sleepily agree to it.  And when you’re having the conversation he requires constant stimulation to keep him awake.  There’ll be long silences puncuated by the nurse saying, “Dr. Nephro…you still with me?”  To which he’ll groggily assent that yes, he was still there, kind of.

A friend of mine had called him one night for a patient with out of control blood sugars figuring to start an insulin drip to get the patient better controlled.

As the nurse is on the phone “Uh, OK.” says Dr. Nephro, then  silence.

“Dr. Nephro?  Are you still there?”

“Huh?  Oh yeah.  Uhhh…let’s start a Vitamin K drip…” trails off as he falls back asleep.

“Dr. Nephro?  Don’t you mean insulin?”  asks the nurse.

“Uh yeah.  Sure.” he replies then proceeds to give relatively cogent orders for the insulin drip, with a little extra prodding from the nurse.

About 6am, we get a phone call at the nurses station.  It’s Dr. Nephro.

“Uh…” sheepishly he asks, “Did I order a Vitamin K drip on someone last night?  I seem to remember getting called, but I can’t recall if I actually ordered that.  Did I?”

Being the good charge nurse I replied, “Well, you started to…”

“Really?” he asked.

“Yeah, but the nurse re-clarified it with you and got the insulin drip the patient actually needed.”  I replied.

“Oh, OK.  Thanks for being on top of it.”  he said as he hung up.

I was talking to a nurse over on the renal floor and she said that they can pretty much get whateve they want out of him when he’s like that.  It does however, make for some interesting morning phone calls!