Eight o'clock last night, migration of hardware at one of the hospital systems that we support began. I took all the agents down so that the server team can begin their work. They tell me the next step will be about 2:00 AM but after some discussion we determine that I won't be able to bring the agents back up then so no need for me to plan to get up.
So sometime between 10:00 and 11:00, I get into bed. Take my meds, rub lotion on my feet, get the pillows all situated, and get all comfortably tucked in and my phone pages me to tell me that a user has opened a ticket because they can't see lab results. That's important. I get up, go read the ticket description and call the user. I knew immediately when the user answered the phone that he was a very grumpy old man and that this phone call was probably not going to be pleasant. I actually feel kind of sorry for him. He couldn't find one good thing to say about anything. And he had a LOT to say. Long story short, he wants to look at lab reports in another system, but according to the ticket assigned to me by a team member on the other system, they don't keep lab results going back that far so he will have to use HPF. He doesn't want to use HPF. Doesn't know how to use HPF. He wants to use Powerchart. Anyway, before the call was over and after me telling him twice that I can't help him if he didn't listen to me and work with me, I showed him how to log into HPF and look at lab reports. His final remarks to me?
"Well, I guess I just won't be able to see lab results so I won't be able to help this patient."
I can't even imagine how he could help a patient in the first place. I shudder to think that someone like this who can't express a rational thought, can't listen or follow simple instructions, can't answer a question where the answer is a simply yes or no, could EVER help a patient. This man sounded so unhappy with life that I would be afraid that even if he could make a decision to help, because of his negative outlook that he would kill the patient just to save that person from the drudgery that is every day life.
Anyway, I was frustrated about that call. Get back into bed. Get settled and than notice an alert that needed to be taken care of before I go to sleep because it is something that I would get paged on later. Except that I am not getting paged. At all. Normally I get about 80 pages my first 24 hours on call (or more) and I haven't gotten one. My phone is working, but it doesn't appear that the e-mail notification group is working because the last e-mail/alert in the boxes is from Wednesday. I actually like it better not getting paged every few minutes for things that 99% of the time can wait until morning, but because something big could happen, I know that I won't be able to sleep well because I try to keep my finger on the pulse of the systems to prevent bigger problems.
So, I get up and go check this alert and find several big problems that took me about three hours to work on and figure out the problem. I get back in bed around 2:00, get all settled, start watching "Parks and Recreation" to help me relax and go to sleep and at 3:00 I get called from the team doing the migration telling me that they are ready for me to start all the agents. I go start all the agents and most of them are failing because they can't access a shared drive. I call the team back and they tell me that yeah, that share won't be available until early Sunday morning. UGH. So I go back to bed and around 4:00 fall asleep.
At 6:00 AM, Paisley tells me that she has been in her kennel long enough and she needs to go outside and talk to a man about a horse.
I know that my boss thinks that I am just a big baby because I complain so much about how lack of sleep kills me during these on-call weeks, but it hurts. I went back to sleep about 6:30 and got up at 10:00 and I have felt sick all day. I don't know if it is my age, or the fact that I have problems sleeping so if my sleep is disturbed it takes a while for me to get back to sleep or if I just really do over exaggerate the pain, but lack of sleep is hard on me. It affects everything about me.
Tonight, hopefully will be better. At least my phone won't be disturbing me with text messages.
June 18: Addendum. I got an e-mail today from the Powerchart team who said that they have had several problems with the grumpy doctor and that they would contact the COO at that hospital and let him deal with Dr. Grumpy. Made me feel a little better.
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