If you are not reading Six-Year-Med-Student's pager-blogging, you are missing something. It will enrich your life. (I swear, the other day out of the blue, my exhausted husband kinda giggled-n-snorted to himself and muttered "nipple-tweaker". I just looked at him and fell out laughing. And then he laughed more. And then we both laughed so hard our sides hurt. It was even better than the morgue episode!)

But, I digress. I was reading Danielle's blogging about all her pager-ing and it reminded me of MY last medical pager-ing moment. I was in the hospital with my first son. It was the middle of the night. I had a serious question about my medication (and what I could take that wouldn't interact). Each time I asked the nurse, she blew me off with "I'll have to check". That continued for hours and hours.

I started to get a little testy. Finally, I decided to call the answering-service for my doctor. Knowing SOMEONE was "on call", and he would have the answer. So I had the doctor paged. Sixty seconds later, a nurse was literally running into my room asking what I needed. ( ... get an image of Max-The-Bunny from Max-n-Ruby in your mind, with his ears flat and his eyes beady ... )

I looked her in the eye and told her slowly and clearly that I wanted an answer to my question about my medication. She blurted out "You paged him for THAT!?!" It seems that the service had paged the doctor (waking him up) with the message that there was an emergency and given him my phone number. Which he immediately recognized as one of the hospital rooms! Apparently, nurses and interns were missing appendages after he was done with them!

The story ends with the nurses-n-interns straightening out my medication QUICK and that particular round of pain was gone in a few minutes. It was a learning moment for everyone. Interns learned to not REALLY mess with a patient who has access to a phone. I learned that, as a patient, access to a phone will fix many things as fast as you can dial :)