I think because of litigation, things have changed a great deal for trainees — and for the better; sadly, however its one of those things where people have to get sick, or die, before there are any changes.

The other side of the debate, however, is that if you reduce the number of hours people can *be* on call from say 24-32h to 12h, you may have to extend the length of the training (5 years to 7 years) so people can “see” enough pathology. You tend to learn a lot after hours, actually.

The flipside is “how much can you actually learn” when you’re that sleep deprived.

Interesting debate.

t

The Blogathon is for 24 hours straight, a much more reasonable sleepless period.

Okay, when I was younger it was more reasonable. Now…hmm.

Please! If this is for real, stop it immediately.

Such excessive blogging will not only lead to serious health problems, but if continued may lead to long-term disasters; may even harm the biological functioning of your body.

Your well-wisher.

For me, sometimes going for days without sleep or enough sleep results in talking directly about issues. I love that, though I also like avoiding it. It is nice to talk about mistakes, and it is bad to point fingers and say “This is the person who made the mistake but is covering it up by lying!”

It can be easy for some people keep on going for 48 hours or more with small naps or even almost no nap in between. In 2005 I volunteered to help with the Hurricane victims near the East Coast and staying up for even 3 days in a row while working and sitting down for a few minutes in between felt interesting. All you need is a distraction of any kind every once a while, whether it’s doing something else, or sitting down, or even a nap. Being as productive as on regular days, or even more, is what comes up as a challenging task. Your body feels sleep, and you feel exhausted, yet you do not want to sleep. You think about things with a different perspective, and you look at things differently. For me, people have different levels of tolerance towards nap times and prolonged times without naps. Some people may feel refreshed with 10 minutes of small nap, while others may become moody and less productive if they get anything less than an hours worth of sleep time.

One of my favorite things to do when I am up for longer durations of time, which happens almost every 2 to 3 days, is to look at all my ideas and drafts for future posts while I am dead tired. That allows me to think differently a little bit and I am almost usually able to add a lot more information or ideas into my writing.

This shows it is a good thing we are not robots, since we can use even exhaustion and lack of sleep to view things and think differently.

Sheer will power and energy snacks. That’s how I’m staying awake as always. Also as always, it’s all going to degrade into gibberish the last few hours. You can’t blog for that long and still make sense especially with posts like mine.

Cheers
t @ dji