Inspired by Barbados Butterfly

I am in the Well Baby nursery at my hospital. I see all new babies born to the university service and follow them for the duration of their hospital stay. Since I'm an Intern (for only 7 more weeks) I take a ridiculous amount of call. Although, I'm not sure that it will be any different when I'm NOT an intern. When on-call, I have been admitting patients to the general pediatrics service. In light of the conversation Barbados Butterfly shared in her recent post here is conversation that took place a few nights ago while on-call.

It's 3:30 a.m. I've been asleep MAYBE an hour (which is lucky)

Nurse: Doctor, are you covering pt. Doe?
Me: Yes
Nurse: His platelet count is 1.3 million
Me: That's high, we should repeat the lab to make sure it's accurate. How fast can we get the repeat results back?
Nurse: We can run it STAT.
Me: I think that's a good idea. Let me know the results.

1.5 hours later, I haven't heard from said nurse and decide to call.

Me: Hi, this is Dr. Brown. Did that repeat platelet count come back.
Nurse: Oh, we're going to draw that in about 10 minutes.

HUH?

This critically high platelet count was so critical that you called me in the middle of the night to tell me about it...that you waited 1.5 HOURS to draw the STAT repeat lab?!?

To say I was annoyed is putting it mildly.

I am not dogging all nurses. I take pride in having an excellent working relationship with 99.9% of the nurses I have worked with. I couldn't do my job without them and there has been a nurse or 2 in my life that has saved my back side. So please do not flood my comments with venom and hatred where none exists.