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Wilkommen to my blog - my name is Karin Purshouse, and I'm a doctor in the UK. If you're looking for ramblings on life as a cancer doctor, my attempts to dual-moonlight as a scientist and balancing all that madness with a life, you've come to the right place. I'm training to be a cancer specialist, and am currently doing a PhD in cancer stem cell biology. All original content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Friday 19 October 2012

Night shifts

Night shifts are....

1) Waking up patients who really don't want to be woken up because that blood test result you were asked to chase took until 11pm to come back and turned out to be really quite abnormal.

2) Questioning your judgement.  All. The. Time.

3) Asking your seniors unbelievably stupid questions about unimportant things (but you'll remember and learn for next time).

4) Trying to not get too creeped out by the long, dark hospital corridors you are walking along by yourself.

5) Jumping a mile when your bleep goes off just as you've found somewhere to sit quietly for five minutes.

6) IV fluids.

7) Sometimes making tough choices about where to be at any given time.

8) Sometimes feeling this is what you actually trained for 6 years for rather than doing lots of daytime paperwork.

9) Sometimes feeling that 6 years was so not enough.

10) Switching your entire body clock around - a 2:1 ratio of work to sleep will just have to do.

but most of all:
Trying your hardest to keep your wits about you for a very long time, and having something to look forward to when it's all over!

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