Back in the day, there were interns and residents and these young doctors in training always stayed in the hospital all night when on call.  Depending on the rotation, as I recall, this on call schedule was usually every third night.  However, unlike today, junior medical students who were rotating on month long clinical rotations were also on call with their supervising interns or residents and therefore, also stayed in the hospital all night, in – house.  That way, the residents and interns might get a little sleep because the lowly medical students were running around doing all night doing the scut – work, like putting in intravenous lines, sometimes central lines (senior students), drawing blood, evaluating patients who the nurses thought were deteriorating, placing naso – gastric tubes and sometimes doing things they should not have been doing.

And sometimes, I remember getting a little sleep without interruption —maybe an hour or two would be a luxury as a medical student.  Of course, we had to be up early to grab something to eat  with our intern and resident before presenting cases to our attending who would wax eloquent about our patients from the night before while we tried not to fall asleep, but when we did of course, the attending would immediately ask us a complex question to keep us on our sleeping toes and embarrass the hell out of us.

And believe it or not, we didn’t have cell phones back then.  Just beepers and big fat walkie – talky things that looked like they could be small banjos hanging out of our oversized lab coat pockets. Sometimes the resident, in his/her almighty leadership role would call on our big fat banjo things that we were meeting in cafeteria: “Nutrition rounds at 11:45”.  Now of course this blasted so loud on our banjos that every patient and staff member within half a mile would realize that we were all meeting for lunch, and this loud pronouncement usually interrupted me from my intense interview of a patient who usually would break out laughing.  “You hungry Carson? Your people are waiting for you.”

Now, of course, in the morning, if we were not awake already by 5:30, it was mandatory that we wake up on time or we would be up the creek without a paddle. So, we figured out that there was something called a wake – up call. That’s why I mentioned no cell phones, so of course, we couldn’t program anything privately to wake us up and I never remembered to bring my stupid wind – up clock We would call the hospital operator when we eventually fell into bed and say, “Wake me up at 5:30 please” and she of course had the number of our banjo thingies.

Turns out there were only three pleasurable things about being a medical student scut – puppy.  The first is that we were able to eat for free in the hospital cafeteria.  The second pleasure was the painted mural on the walls of the call rooms in the ancient, but secret catacombs of the hospitals.  These must’ve been painted by students and interns from many years previously, but they usually depicted scantily clad young ladies laying against the walls, staring at us as we slept, or at least tried to sleep. Now that was excellent, however, I think for some reason it may be illegal or frowned upon now, I don’t know. And the third pleasure was the wake – up call.  No, waking up was not a pleasure, but the operators I think, made things a little more tolerable for us, or maybe, just me.  I don’t know.  I never asked anyone else.  Or maybe it was just one special operator.

So, when I asked the operator to wake me up at 5:30, she used her best honey – coated sultry voice to say, “t’s my pleasure honey, sweet dreams babe.” Such a smooth and tantalizing voice, and the truth is no one called me babe before.  I liked it.  Made me feel special or something you know.

So, if I was lucky enough to sleep, the phone would ring at 5:15 or 5:30, I don’t remember, and although I hated the phone, I learned to love her dripping, sexy voice.  “Good morning honey. I hope you slept well. I need you to be really fresh for me today. Have a good day sweetie, and I can’t wait until you call me again in a few days.”  Or, she would say something like, “Good morning babe, I missed you, please have a good day, and don’t forget me honey. I will wait for you.” I smiled despite having only one eyelid that I could pry open at that hour, and because I was shy, would only say something innocuous like, “Thank you, have a good day.”  I don’t remember if I ever got her name, but I probably did.

Sometimes I had a roomie across the room, a fellow student or intern, and I never knew whether my colleague received the same call, but I never saw him smile or say anything after his call.   Interesting.  We never talked about it, or at least, I never broached it because I thought it as you know, something naughty that I needed to keep to myself but I must admit, I wanted to protect it as a simple playful pleasure that made my on call nights a little bit more tolerable, and started my day off right with a burst of non – caffeinated, hormonal stimulant.

Yes,  it may be true that she said the same thing to other students and interns, but I didn’t want to think about that, and yes, I thought about meeting her some time, just to see what she looked like, you know, and to say introduce myself and thank her, but I never did. Maybe that would have ruined everything due to my own imagination of what she looked like, from her voice. Ironically, although I hated receiving wake up calls, because I needed sleep, I did look forward to that operator’s sexy voice on the other end.

Personal wake – up calls are sure a lot more exciting than a cell phone alarm going off, don’t you think? And does anyone think anything like this story could happen again in 2020?

©SRCarson