AAP Voices

Today was my first day as a virtual reality doc working from home. Kind of terrifying, not like treating COVID patients in full PPE, but still scary.

I checked my schedule repeatedly yesterday and found no patients for today, and went to bed at 10 p.m. I haven’t set my alarm in three weeks, since I now work the late shift.

Woke up at 8:05 a.m., uh oh! Scrambled to my computer, logged in, found an 8 a.m. phone consult. 

Grabbed the night guard out of my mouth, picked up my cell phone, called the mom, and as calmly as possible, asked her what was up. 

I put her on speaker phone so I could type, but F2 on my home keyboard did not work. So I took notes with pen and paper. An 8-year-old with chronic constipation and two days of belly pain and vomiting. I sent a Miralax prescription and spent 25 minutes outlining a plan.

I checked my schedule again. Uh oh. 8:30 a.m. phone visit. Called this mom, now 15 minutes late, already hating my first virtual day and flooded with cortisol.

Now I had six pages of scribbled notes and a WebEx meeting with the Pediatric Virtual Visit work group at 9 a.m. Quickly made coffee, tried to open my email but was locked out of Outlook. Breathe, Jane, breathe. Tried to log in through Webex and failed. Eventually joined by phone.

My partners told me to do the following:

Hit the function key to make F2 work. (Aha!) 

Use Skype for Business to ask for help. (Never heard of it.) 

Use Doximity to make calls so your cell number isn’t shown. (Never heard of it.) 

Sign your patients up for MyChart during the call. (No idea how.)

How could I be so good at doctoring and so bad at all of this? This blog post is my catharsis. We’re all on the learning curve, and we will prevail.

Send in your COVID-19 pandemic story, and we may share it here and on our social media channels. https://bit.ly/2XVvJIu