Danielle Ofri

Mr. Soto in 16 East is having chest pain.

Mrs. Ahmed in 17 North has a fever.

Mr. Halal's daughter's here and wants to talk to a doctor.

Mrs. Rashid fell out of bed.

Mrs. Kwan's refusing her meds.

Mr. Nolan's having a blood transfusion reaction.

Mr. Rivera's IV is out again.

And so Night Float turned out to be 10 hours of damage control.

I raced from one ward to the next, patching things up, putting out fires, just hoping to keep everyone alive until the sun came up over the East River and the day teams came back.

So one night in my second week of night float, I get paged by my resident around 3, 4 o'clock in the morning.

Elba Rodriguez's blood count just dropped 13 points.

Get over to 16 North, do a rectal, see if she's bleeding from her gut.

Now, you should know that in the human body, there are only a few places where you can bleed briskly enough to drop your hematocrit 13 points.

And the GI tract is the prime suspect.

And if you bleed anywhere along that line, from the mouth to the esophagus, stomach, small intestine, large intestine, rectum, there'll be traces of blood in the stool.

So the way you check for a GI bleed is you get a stool sample, you put it on the card, and you put a few drops of the special developer fluid on it.

And if it turns blue, that's blood.

And the way you get a stool sample is you send an intern over to do a rectal exam.

And so at this point in my career, I was very adept at taking orders.

I didn't ask questions, I did what I was told.