Q4 Kicks My Ass

Or, A Lesson on Terminology.

In medicine, every drug or intervention order must include a frequency. Furthermore, doctors are lazy writers. Abbreviations? Hell yes! Acronyms are good too. So instead of writing "every 4 hours" or "every day" we write "q4h" or "qday". That's a reduction of nearly 73% or 57% respectively.

As a group, residents expand this system to quantify our call nights. Call runs on a repeating schedule - every third, fourth or fifth night. Hence, q3, q4 or q5. As an intern, I had a lot of q4 months. And I did okay.

I must be old, but now q4 really kicks my ass. I feel like I'm on call or post call all the time. I'm tired, I'm cranky and my undereye circles are expanding at an exponential rate. And let's not even talk about the party my acne is having on my chin. Yuck.

But repeat after me, I'm not an intern any more! This remains cause for celebration. I only have have two months of call this year. Sooooooooooo much better than ten months, and it is soooooooooo good to NOT be on the bottom of the totem pole.

So really, life ain't bad.