Where Are All the Pages?

Interns get paged a lot. Last year, I easily got 20-30 pages a day, from nurses, consultants, medical students ("where are you?"), administration, and friends. Other interns (like surgical colleagues) get even more pages, and it's insane. If you imagine it takes 2-3 minutes to return a page (in an ideal world), that's an hour spent on the phone. We learn to dread our pagers and to celebrate when we forward our pagers and leave the hospital. Even hearing someone else's pager vibrate or ring triggers a reflexive touch to the hip.

That all changed this year. Moving from being an intern to a second-year resident and switching programs to anesthesia (where we aren't primary teams for patients and where everyone knows where to find us) is mindboggling. I get a page a day, or less, and often the page I get each day is myself testing out my pager (is it working? No one's tried to contact me for hours!). No more interruptions, more efficient work, and less scut. It's awesome.