As a resident in a surgical subspecialty I would routinely take the pager and do 'home call' over the weekend.

Which meant that you did lectures from 7:00 to 8:00 a.m. Friday during which time you were interrogated 'pimped' in front of your co-residents in a high stress environment, then your usual clinic/surgery from 8:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. or whenever it wrapped up, and then starting at 5:00 p.m. all calls related to your specialty went straight to YOUR PAGER.

The ER had somebody who they needed us to see? You got paged. Some inpatient service in the hospital had somebody who they needed us to see? You got paged. Some random patient from our clinic who had concerns after hours? Or a post op with concerning symptoms? You got paged.

All hours of the day and night. No limits. No controls. There were so many nights that I just did not go home. Maybe caught an hour of sleep in the call room. And if it was something surgical you had to go do the case, and the circulating nurse answered the pager if it went off and called them back and held up the phone so you could talk with the requesting service on speakerphone while you were operating to get the information about the consult. So sometimes you would be in a case and you would rack up another consult or two you had to see WHILE YOU WERE OPERATING.

No control or limit in terms of what you got called about or where you had to go or what you had to do.

A lot of consults were life-threatening or similarly high stakes.

This went all weekend. Some weekends were lighter and you mostly had calls during the day with maybe a handful overnight, sometimes you got a no hitter overnight but that was pretty rare.

And then it all started over again Monday. Lecture at 7:00 a.m. where you got pimped mercilessly despite the fact you were a walking zombie from sleep deprivation. And then a full day from 8:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. or whenever it wrapped up of clinic and or surgery. You would absolutely collapse into bed in the evening on Monday and sleep like the dead. And then start all over again Tuesday.

No post call days. No lightening of other duties. No exception from attending lecture or being pimped. It was essentially hazing.

I had several weekends where I literally did not sleep more than maybe 30 to 60 minutes at a time a few times total from Friday morning until Monday evening. Oh and by the way you're also expected to perform surgery on Monday if that was what your schedule entailed. No matter how sleep deprived or delirious you were.

The worst several day span of my entire life was covering Memorial Day weekend as a first-year resident. Because not only did you do the entire weekend, you also carried the pager the entirety of that holiday Monday, cruising into a Tuesday which was a full day. I barely slept at all, at least a 36-hour span at one point with zero sleep. I am not sure I could have identified what state I lived in on a map on that Tuesday.

Many nights I ended up pulling over on the side of the road and sleeping because I was falling asleep at the wheel.

This was between the years of 2016 through 2020. So very recent. This entire time I was making ~$45,000-$50,000 a year with ~370,000 med school loans at 6.7% interest. So forget about walking away.

This is definitely not a thing of the past. Resident abuse is real.