Errant Call

It was 2 o’clock in the morning, when I was awakened when my cell phone started chiming. It was a page by Spok, the messaging system of the hospital that I cover in Des Moines. Spok is a secure texting platform designed for healthcare providers. On the message, it was telling me to call the Emergency Department regarding a patient that needs to be admitted to the ICU.

This kind of scenario is normal if I’m on-call. Except that night I was not. In fact I was 2,600 miles away from the hospital who was paging me, as I was on a different call – the call of the wild, exploring the wilderness of Alaska.

It was an errant page. The operator made a mistake of sending the page to me. My mistake was that I did not turn my status as “unavailable” on the Spok messaging system, nor did I activate the “do not disturb” on my phone.

It is interesting that a paging system can reach you wherever you are, no matter how far you are, and even if you are in the fringes of the Earth.

There was a TV ad in the late 1980’s that I remember when I was still in medical school in Manila. In that commercial there was this man on a small boat, fishing in a river in some remote area, when his beeper went off. Beeper was still the trend at that time. Then the man pulled out of his bag a “top of the line” mobile phone. The phone was bigger than a brick and needed to be held by 2 hands. He made a call and the person on the other end said: “Hello Doctor…..”

That ad was implying that you can go anywhere and yet still be connected by a phone call away. That was the beginning of the mobile phone era. Today everyone has it and we don’t go anywhere without it.

After finishing medical school, the proud moment for us besides being addressed as doctors was to have a hospital issued beeper holstered in our waists. We wore it as a badge of honor, showing everyone that we earned this responsibility of wearing a beeper. There were times when I was a medical resident in the New York Metro Area back in the mid 1990’s, that I had to lug 2 beepers while rounding in the hospital: 1 is my own and the other 1 is the “code leader” beeper for medical emergencies.

After my medical residency and fellowship training, I also got a mobile phone on top of my pager, so I could be anywhere and still make a call when I was paged. Good thing was by that time the mobile phone had shrunk to a size that fits the pocket. My first cell phone was a Motorola flip phone. This was early 2000’s and we were still living near Orlando during that time. I could be in Disney with my kids and still answer my calls. Besides, if I needed to run to the hospital that I cover, it was only 45 minutes away from Disney’s theme parks.

As time passed, smart phones replaced the “dumb” phones and beepers disappeared all together. Now I can call or text or even chat in a secure HIPAA-compliant messaging platforms.

But the boon of being constantly connected, either with pagers, phones, or texting platforms, has also become the bane of our existence as doctors. Over the years, it does not matter whether I am eating dinner, reading bedtime stories to my kids, catching up on sleep, or even inside the bathroom, I can get calls. After more than 30 years of being chained and enslaved to these communication systems, now all I want is to be free from them even temporarily.

My time of not being on-call or getting paged is sacred moments for me. Not having to answer my phone is like claiming sanctuary. And that night, my sanctuary was intruded by that errant call.

It took me a while to fall back asleep that particular night. One saving grace, aside from being in an enchanting place, was that the night was still considered “young,” as sunset was at 12:45 AM in Alaska that summer day. Yes, you read it right. We were in the land of the midnight sun.

But at 2 AM, it was also technically break of dawn already, as sunrise was at 3 o’clock in the morning. A short night that was even cut shorter.

Thus, I threw away my phone!

No, I’m just kidding. But I did silenced it the rest of the trip.

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(*photos taken in Denali National Park)