Sometimes when I work the overnight shift, my internal quirks blossom in ways that are amusing and hard to understand:
Every day around 5 pm, the day doctors round the overnight doctor before they leave. This means if I am the overnight doctor, each day doctor gives me a rundown on each of their inpatients. It's good to write down the details so I don't have to try to remember them when, later, the dog in ICU 7 starts randomly having seizures (or whatever).
There are usually 25-30 patients staying the night, and I am receiving new ERs while keeping an eye on them. Fun!
Everyone does it differently. I sit down and write a bullet-pointed list of the facts that come out of each day doctor's mouth while she is talking. If a particular day doctor is not here the next morning to re-take over her patient (say, she has the day off), I have to know enough about the patient to intelligently round the new group of day doctors.
If you think this sounds like a game of telephone, it's because it's exactly what it is. Except you cannot let the message mutate. Yaaaaaay!
One morning at rounds, I was talking about a patient when I realized that (for an unknown reason) I had written "to go home banana" on my list of facts.
I'm not sure what that meant. Perhaps I was hungry at the time?