Nightcalls

Unlike some people I know who only need to do 2 night calls for the entire surgery posting, I have to do a minimum of 4 night calls and of course, we people at ttsh are extremely hardworking. Crazily so in fact. Some of us even do literal night calls, stay up the whole night and go directly to sch the next day for pharmaco lectures. Even I, the slacking queen, have already done 3 night calls, 2 in one week.
No don’t be shocked; I haven’t morphed into AQ. All 3 of those night calls were because our tutors could only take us for tutorial at ungodly hours. We stayed back last Monday to wait for Dr M only to have her tell us at 9pm that she couldn’t make it and that we should meet her on Wednesday instead. So we finally had our tutorial with her on Wednesday at 8.30 (yes pm), but she was so incredibly nice, she invited us to join her for dinner and even treated us to dessert! So naturally we all forgave her.

Then yesterday, we had our first tutorial with our supervisor. She went to Africa for the first two weeks of our posting and when she came back and we asked her for tutorial, this was what she said: �Night call also considered tutorial right?�
So there we were going around clerking when she called Greg to deliver the joyful news that she would meet us at 10.30pm for the tutorial.
Greg: “10.30???�
Cris and Wk percussed the table vehemently (Zixiang’s sign of vulgarity) while I just went “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!�
But what to do, no choice loh! We waited patiently for our tutorial.
But meanwhile we always have the most fun during nightcalls. I think it must be the hysteria setting in.

Last nightcall, we went crazy over our MOTU joke. MOTU is short for “Man of the Universe� by which Greg insisted we call him. So we affectionately call him MOTU pronounced as Muthu much to his disgust, and we found it so funny that we kept professing our affection for him with that term of endearment. (Actually, on second thought, like really not very funny hor?)

This time, Greg released his full power and teased the crap out of poor Leonard for staying so late in school when the guy was actually kind enough to stay and talk crap with us. Greg insisted that he had a thing for our supervisor Ho, and subjected the poor guy to a gruelling cross-examination causing Leonard to confess to having "HOt dates" and "wHOlesome fun". Things deteriorated to a sleazy theme when somebody mentioned "yang guo and gugu" and Wk blurted out "ConDO heroes", the rest of our conversation, shall i say, is not fit to be published on this blog where I advocate good wHOlesome fun.
We also watched an amazing laparotomy for the biggest IO I’ve ever seen. The patient actually aspirated feculent material via NG tube and the intestines looked like oversized sausages.
Time passed quickly after that and before we knew it we were following our tutor about the place at 10.30pm. By 11.30pm, everyone but Wk were walking zombies and we sort of flopped about the place on each other.

It was definitely a different experience though seeing the hospital at night but it’s an experience I hope to experience as seldom as possible.
Which reminds me, please remind me to blog about my close encounter of the third kind during one of my nightcalls in Changi. Yes, the haunted hospital.