One of the consequences of carrying the hospital ophthalmology on-call pager is that you end up becoming the primary eye consultant for anyone who knows your number. ANYONE. This includes people outside the hospital’s referral network.

Last week I received a call from a gynecologist who worked at the hospital but was 2 hours away. She noticed that her eye was  “bloodshot”, and described to me signs of a subconjunctival hemorrhage. Of course there was nothing I could do except offer her a ticket to my emergency room if she wanted an examination. She declined.

On Saturday morning at 4:30am, I received a page from the hospital’s cardiothoracic (CT) surgery fellow worried about his own red eye. I had just stepped foot in my apartment 10 minutes earlier, after a horrible slew of ED consultations. I asked him to drop by our weekend clinic at 8:30am for examination, but he stated that he was scrubbing into “a case” and probably would not be finished until 10am.

As angry as I felt for being paged for likely non-emergent personal consultations, I actually felt sorry for the CT fellow.

Then I realized the reason for the high volume of non-emergent calls is that people, no matter how educated they are, know very little about the eye. Who knew that you shouldn’t wear daily contacts for 4 days straight? Yes, if you wear inch-thick eye liner, some of it will get into your eyes.

I guess that’s why ophthalmologists still have jobs.

medicine rant