3 a.m. Things To Do

Our neighborhood is primarily residential, but our house is along a busy road that eventually feeds onto  the highway on-ramp. Hence, our road becomes quite busy from the earliest morning commute until pretty late at night.

So, you know you’re up at an ungodly hour when you don’t hear even one car for a long time.

There are very few good reasons to be up at 3 a.m. Feeding a fussy baby is one of them. Babygirl is currently a tad off-schedule. She had been sleeping “through the night”, meaning for good 6-7 hours stretches on occasion; but lately, due to her extreme occasional colicky- ness, we’ve been experimenting with different formulas, and she seems to be sleeping for shorter stretches.

Not that she’s been colicky today or tonight. She’s been great. Just awake and hungry. And she even fell right back to sleep at 2:30 a.m.

My problem is that I did not fall right back to sleep. So here I am, at 3 a.m. formulating my To Do list for tomorrow.Tomorrow being Saturday, and me not on call, and with some fun plans with some old doctor pals, you’d think I’d be sleeping like my baby here.

But no. I’m lying in bed awake fretting about some of the patients I saw today:

Did I miss something in that lovely 82-year-old with fatigue and a cough? So what if her chest xray was negative, she really wasn’t her usual self, she was dragging, so unlike her. Hmmm.

The middle-aged lady with the huge list of vague but disabling symptoms who had already been seen and worked up by 3 other physicians- Did my set of labs reveal the answer to her mystery ailment?

So I finally got up and went to the computer and logged into work and checked on labs, researched some diagnoses and medications.

Hmmm. Probably not a good idea to prescribe antibiotics for my 82-year-old, without a working diagnosis. I’ll just call her tomorrow to see how she’s doing, if there’s any new symptoms. Should have got a urine culture, darn.

Ha! The middle-aged lady has crazy inflammation! Looks like some auotimmune/ rheumatologic thing. At last we can call her in some prednisone, and get her some relief.

With that,  I wrote down these two patients’ phone numbers so I can call them tomorrow; and I wrote down this blog.

And now, I will try to go back to sleep, before Babygirl awakens for her next bottle.