New nocturnal hospitalist at St. Joe’s: “I’m a bit of night owl”
By Chris Motola
Q: You’re a nocturnal hospitalist. What made you want to work that shift?
A: A couple things, I guess. I’m a bit of night owl. So that works for me. And at night you’re on your own, so there’s more responsibility, but also more freedom and independence. You’re pretty much just there for admissions, so you can focus more on evaluating the patients, working up the patient and then moving on to the next one. Whereas during the daytime you can kind of get sidetracked by secondary calls and stuff like that. So that’s one thing I enjoy about working evenings.
Q: What hours do you work?
A: I work 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. seven days in a row and then I get the following week off. So it’s a seven-seven schedule.
Q: Are there more emergent complaints at night?
A: For the most part people can’t plan emergencies, so they’re scattered throughout the day. Sometimes you do get patients who put conditions off throughout the day and then, later in the evening, decide to present to the hospital to be evaluated. But for the most part it doesn’t really differ too much between day and night.
Q: What kinds of patients do you typically see?
A: Anything that gets admitted. I see a lot of upper respiratory infections, urinary tract infections, COPD exacerbations, heart failure exacerbations. That probably makes up the majority of what I see. But I also see everything in between.
Q: I assume there are fewer specialists on site at night. How does that affect your work?
A: I do work with an ED attending, so they work on stabilizing the patient, initializing treatment, coming up with an initial diagnosis. And then if there are any needs for surgical involvement, usually they’ll have contacted that service before they reach me. If they haven’t that will usually be my recommendation as well. But if they’re stable enough to be evaluated in the morning by surgery or whichever specialty, that will be my recommendation for the morning team.
Q: You have a pretty eclectic background, with education in cognitive development and military experience with electrical and nuclear engineering. How did this lead to a career as a hospitalist?
A: It’s hard to say it all came together. But as far as nuclear power goes I grew up right outside of Saratoga. Right outside of it in Malta is a nuclear training plant for the Navy. So growing up there I knew some of the sailors who were training there. And I had no real plans after high school, so that seemed like a reasonable starting point. I always have had a passion for technology, so that’s where I ended up once in the Navy. Electrical work is kind of mechanical as well, so you deal with heavy equipment, large motors, circuit boards, so it kind of split the difference between mechanical and electrical for me. You learn a lot of systems — it’s kind of similar to medicine in that way, especially the large aircraft carriers. It’s all one system. You have the plumbing, the electrical. It’s analogous the body in some ways. So you have to troubleshoot. If something takes out one pump, what does it do down the line? What other systems are affected? So that troubleshooting process I think drew me to both. In the civilian industrial sector, because you really don’t want things to break, you don’t get to do as much troubleshooting. There’s a lot of studying and planning, but generally nothing really happens. So I wanted something a bit more challenging. That’s what led me to medicine.
Q: Did you have the opportunity to learn medical skills in the Navy or did that come after?
A: Not really. I had a family friend before I joined, someone who lived down the street. I can’t remember his specialty, but he was a physician who took a similar path. He did six years in the Navy prior to becoming a physician. I might have had that in the back of my mind. My last year in the Navy was when I really started brainstorming careers. It was up in the air between electrical engineering and medicine and I ultimately chose medicine. At the end of the day I was looking for a challenge and medicine presented more of one to me.
Q: You have some general surgery training. Is that a part of your practice at St. Joe’s?
A: No, I just did what’s called a prelim surgical year, so it’s just signing on for a single year. Sometimes there’s a chance to upgrade it to a full residency in surgery, but I was really only doing it for that one year while I had a gap in training. I don’t currently have plans to pursue it, but what I’ve learned from it helps me pretty much every single day at work, especially down in the ER working with post-op surgical patients, patients who have suturing, wound care.
Q: What brought you to St. Joe’s?
A: Most of my family lives in Saratoga, so that’s not that far away. My girlfriend — longtime partner —moved here to work at the zoo. She’s the veterinarian for the zoo. So that’s kind of why I moved here and was looking for residencies in the area and I’d heard multiple great things about St. Joe’s so that made it my number one choice.
Q: Do you see yourself working the night shift long into your career?
A: It’s taxing on the body. But I’m still early in my career so I’ll do it while I have the energy, probably for the next several years.
Lifelines
Name: Daniel Lewis, M.D.
Position: Nocturnal hospitalist at St. Joseph’s Health Hospital
Hometown: Saratoga
Education: Medical degree from University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine; bachelor’s degree in human development with a concentration in cognitive development from Cornell University’s College of Human Ecology in Ithaca. Trained as a fine dining cook under a certified master chef from the Culinary Institute of America
Affiliations: St. Joseph’s Health Hospital; Mercy Hospital (Pittsburgh)
Organizations: American Board of Family Medicine
Family: Partner (veterinarian)
Hobbies: Working on cars, pets, propagating coral