Bored and unproductive

Usually, medicine is one of those jobs where you simply don't ever have time to be bored at work. There's always patients to see, labs to check, nurses to yell at, family to assuage. There is always something to do.

Except for today. I was forced yesterday to send my one patient home, even though I didn't feel comfortable doing it. For health safety reasons. But the short story was, he went home. Having no patients to see this morning, and our team not admitting new patients until 1pm today, I came in to work at 11am. I took full advantage of my morning off to sleep in and make banana muffins. Why I had to come in at 11am instead of 1pm, I'm not sure. In any case, I spent most of the morning finishing up my online applications for residency programs and reading about the White Sox. Good times.

Fast forward 7.5 hours. My accomplishments for the day include:
-- eating
-- submitting my common application form
-- eating
-- eating
-- re-admitting a patient for the 3rd time in the past week, which took all of 28 minutes
-- exhausting my cache of internet reading
-- eating
-- writing post-dated blog entries
-- fielding a few phone calls about other people's patients
-- eating

We're here overnight. I'm going to be bored out of my mind, unless more patients come in. I'm almost wishing that a few patients show up, so I'll have something to do tonight. Of course, the bad karma of the world will probably descend on us and nobody will show up until after the Sox game. Which is when all the veterans who watched the game come stumbling in high or drunk or with heart attacks from all the excitement. Joy.