When I'm on call for general anesthesia the night varies tremendously. Overnight we manage any operations that are going on in the night (things that are emergent or just really long cases that went into the evening). We manage the post op recovery unit while people wake up from anesthesia. We preoperatively evaluate patients to assess the risks of general anesthesia and if each patient is safe to undergo surgery. We hold the Acute Pain Service phones and answer questions about uncontrolled pain, put in new pain blocks (epidurals or other nerve blocks), troubleshoot problems with epidurals, and take new consults. We hold the trauma pagers and attend every trauma for assistance with airway or drugs if needed (and make sure we are ready to go straight to the operating room if necessary). We hold another pager to attend every code blue in the hospital to respond to those and help with leading codes or otherwise managing the airways during code blues. We also respond to every "stat intubation" where we are called to put in breathing tubes for patients in their hospital room who are failing from a respiratory standpoint or cannot protect their airway.
The night may be filled with operating room jobs like organ transplants lasting through the night, or traumas that may or may not go to the operating room, emergent Neuro operations after strokes or hemorrhages. Sometimes the night only has one or two operating room duties and is instead filled with a night of responding to patients with uncontrolled pain. Other times the code pager or stat intubation pager may go off every hour. It's a special combination and no night is the same.
There's no set time for anything to occur but call starts at 7am and ends at 7am the following day. I strongly dislike spending the night in the hospital, but of all the call shifts I've done, this one is by far my favorite. I'm always doing something exciting and I'm never bored or stuck doing a lot of paperwork. It's a lot of medicine, learning, life saving, and fun!