Farewell pager, I ’ll always cherish the memories

This was a momentous week for me. After 14 years of carrying a hospital-grade old-school text pager to receive messages at work, I finally traded it in for a cell phone app. It should have been easy to get rid of my beeper. But instead, I felt waves of nostalgia when I turned it off for the last time. Those 240-character, pre-Twitter, low-resolution LCD messages follow the arc of my medical career and tell its story. It starts with a sound, and trust me when I say those innocent little boxes rival the volume of say, car horns or maybe ambulance sirens. As a resident, I never put my pager on silent mode for fear of missing something crucial, like a patient becoming critically ill under my watch. Not surprisingly, the so-called “Pleasing Alert” I chose for my four years of training — an endless arpeggio of mechanically flattened G-B flat-E flat-G that moved neither up or down the scale- still gives me panic attacks. That arpeggio could strike anytime, each page spinning a deeper and deeper web of multitasking … until I was stuck in a cocoon of tasks hopeful for the hour I would emerge as something better. I knew I had arrived when, as a fully grown attending physician, I changed the tone to a silent vibration. It signified a shift in my role, the ability to focus more on talking to a patient or a colleague, to keep my work pure and my interruptions in the background. Continue reading ... Your patients are rating you online: How to respond. Manage your onlin...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - Category: General Medicine Authors: Tags: Physician Hospital-Based Medicine Pediatrics Source Type: blogs