The dark lining to the white cloud

There's a phenomenon among residents in which some have the most extreme bad luck every time they're on call (3 codes, a fire drill, the two other on-call residents come down with appendicitis, an actual fire, and 17 new admissions between 3 and 6am) while others blissfully watch The Bachelor in the lounge, check on a patient or two, grab some midnight McDonald's soft serve, and then retire to their cozy call room for up to 4 hours of sleep in a row.

The former residents are known as black clouds; The latter, white clouds.

This effect is so pronounced that there have been multiple studies attempting to document it. So far none of these studies have been able to conclusively prove that this occurs.

Oh, but it does. It really does.

I have the great fortune of being a tremendous white cloud. The force of my luck is strong enough to counter even some of our more infamous thunderheads, and it's not unusual for me to spend up to 3 hours at a time lying down while on call.

I almost never get paged or called for anything important. In fact, my past three calls, I was only woken only 4 times/night for normal deliveries and was back in bed within half an hour. Last night, I was miraculously uninterrupted from 10pm to 4am, practically a full night's sleep. Despite this being normal for me, I still have a constant bat-sense alarm going off in my head every 40 minutes or so telling me that clearly something is tragically wrong with my pager, my cellphone, the overhead paging system, and the call-room phone, that all my patients are crashing right now and everyone is trying to reach me, and here I am, asleep, and tragically unaware.

So, every hour, on the hour, I find myself waking up, checking the phone, checking my pager, removing and replacing the battery in my pager, paging myself just to make sure, and more often than not, wandering over to the nursery just to make sure I didn't miss anything.

This has now spilled over to my home life as I still find myself waking up every hour or so convinced that I've slept through some catastrophe of epic importance.

[This is extra funny since, as the intern, I'm about the last person you actually want to show up at the bedside if your patient is having an actual medical event. My typical response to being paged : "Sure I'll come look at the baby, but you should probably call a real doctor too."]

I suppose I'll choose to view this sleep disorder as good practice for the rapidly impending motherhood sneaking up on me early June.

And I will enjoy enjoy enjoy my white cloud as long as it lasts. We'll see if it can handle adult cardiology next month.