mystery reader

So my being on call yesterday was not just mere happenstance, it was actually a request--not so much for the fact of working overnight last night, but the need to be post-call this morning, so I could go into Cal's school to be the "mystery reader" for his kindergarten class. Every week a different "mystery" parent shows up to read a book, and the big excitement is that none of the kids know which parent it will be until you actually show up. Outside of the setup, there's not very much to it, I just showed up at the predetermined time and read a book (well, actually two books--I brought a backup in case my first choice did not go over well, but in the end enthusiasm was high so I ended up reading both) but Cal was very excited to see me.

As per tradition, the kids were all sitting on the carpet when I came in, but they had their heads down so they would not see me until my big "reveal." (Yes, very makeover reality show, I know.) As I walked to my spot it was high drama, as the class was all shouting out muffled guesses of whether I was a man or woman based on the sound of my footsteps. When the teachers finally told them they could lift up their heads to see who the mystery reader was, everyone went "WooooOOOAAAAH!" (imagine the sound of twenty-two kids screaming) and Cal's reaction was priceless--he literally fell down with shock. If it was a cartoon, his hat and shoes would have flown off. Also he would have had exclamation points shooting out of his head, and maybe a couple of springs and cogs.

"You're here! But you never come!" he kept saying to me. (Joe managed to make it in for about twenty minutes two, having scheduled a gap between surgeries.) "I can't believe this! You never come to my school!" I reminded him that mom and dad work at the hospital, and we're very busy, so it's hard for us to come to school for every little class party and field trip and performance during the school day...and anyway, we're here now, aren't we? It takes some planning and some trading and occasionally some wheeling and dealing, but for things that matter, we're here. And that's something, right?

Probably this is a message he'll understand a little better when he's older, because I remember feeling pretty much the same way when I was a kid about my parents' participation at my school. (My parents never even went to Parent-Teacher Conferences, which so far as I can tell are essentially mandatory, but which my parents seemed to view as a somewhat indulgent American custom, and at any rate, only for the parents of kids who were flunking out, which I wasn't.) Joe and I are never going to be those parents who are planning every class party and chaperoning every trip to the zoo, and aside from guilt (which everyone has, regardless) we're fine with that. But we do what we can, we try our best, and we're always there when it's important. Which is essentially what parenthood is, right?

windows

I saw these window washers on the outside of the hospital building this afternoon (look carefully, they are on a hanging walkway near the bottom towards the right) and the first thing I thought is: those guys are never going to finish. Here's another shot of the same building, reflected in the windows of another, equally glassed-in hospital building across the street, the window panes of which I'm sure these guys are also going to have to wash.




It just seems like such a Sisyphean task, because by the time you're done with the last window, it's probably time to start cleaning the first window again, especially so close to the traffic pollution on the highway, or in the spring when the pollen here is so bad. And then I thought: how fitting, because that's exactly what working inside the hospital feels like sometimes too. So many patients. So many issues. You finish one and the next one pops up. Endless. And, after a while, it can all start to run together.

But you keep going, and keep working, and at the end of the day, you can hopefully look back and see that maybe you made things a little better. And then what? More windows to clean. More patients to take care of. So you come back the next day and you do it again and again and again and try, as best as you can, to help.

At least, that's what I thought very briefly, in the three minutes it took me to walk from the ORs to my car. And then I drove home, kissed my kids, and got ready to do it all again tomorrow.

on deck

I know that as someone who writes on the internet I should be more up on this kind of thing, but I just today figured out how an RSS feed works and how to organize them into some kind of reader. I am like your uncle who makes you print out all of his e-mails so that he can read them. (Or the mom who turns off her computer by unplugging it from the wall.) Technology! I has got it!

Anyway, it's back to work tomorrow for me and most everyone, and though you always have that end-of-vacation pang ("if only I had one more day to sleep in, then I would really be refreshed!") for the most part I'm ready to go back. I like my job. I miss doing it.

It's always a little hard to return to the hospital after being on vacation, kind of like stepping off one of those moving walkways at the airport. You have to readjust your pace. Your reflexes are a little slower, and you have to recalibrate them. Your thought process hasn't clicked all the way back in yet, it's like on manual reload versus automatic. (Sorry for the gun metaphor. Just pretend I'm talking about a camera.) I remember coming back from maternity leave after Mack was born, and after six weeks off, how just plain out of practice I felt, like an athlete in the off-season. You don't realize how active of a vocation (both physically and mentally) medicine can be until you have to jump back into it after a prolonged absence. I've only been on vacation since Christmas Eve, and already I feel like fat Elvis.




(Meaning deconditioned, not, you know, actually fat or nostalgically-slash-ironically beloved.)

Anyway, the holidays are over. It's a whole new year. Finish the last of your fruitcake and let's get back in there.

to excess

I sometimes have a problem falling asleep--not for lack of being tired, mind you, but I get into that loop where I am thinking lots of thinks and my mind gets a-racing and next thing I know it's 1:00am and I have to wake up for work in four hours. So sometimes I will take 25mg of Benadryl to help things along. It's just a Tylenol PM without the Tylenol, not habit-forming (so far as I know--maybe some smart neuroscientist among you can tell me if there have been any long-term studies on upregulation of central muscarinic receptors after long-term antihistamine use for whatever reason--but like I said, so far as I know) and man, it works.

I still remember when I was hospitalized in medical school for peritonitis--it's a long story but the short version is that I had appendicitis and they sent me home from the ER and my appendix perfed, which led to about a month of GOOD TIMES--and in the hospital I was prescribed IV Bendadryl prn for sleep. Most of the patients had the standard Ambien PRN reflexively penned into their charts by some dutiful little first-year resident (just like how every patient no matter what they were admitted for* is written for Tylenol PRN, because one less call from the floor for a Tylenol order is possibly one more minute of sleep before the next call from the floor) but since I was NPO (nothing by mouth, you know, because of my guts was all FULL OF PUS) I was written for IV Benadryl instead. I initially thought it was weird to be prescribed an antihistamine a sleep aid, but boy howdy, I am a believer now.

Anyway, I couldn't fall asleep last night, despite initial indications that I would barely be able to stay awake until midnight to ring in the New Year. Only instead of one 25mg Benadryl, for some reason, I took two. Not really sure why, but I'd been taking Benadryl for the past few days (Joe's Aunt Sue, with whom we were staying this week, has two cats that I was unfortunately allergic to--somewhat disgusting aside: I have been told that the major trigger for cat allergies is not so much the cat fur itself rather the cat spit, with which each cat hair is lovingly coating in the process of self-grooming, a factoid that I could have probably done without) and I figured...well, I don't know what I was thinking. Anyway, 25mg = good dose, 50mg = probably overkill. I barely even moved until 9:00am, which is very late for me, at which point the kids practically pried me out of bed with a crowbar. (An acoustic crowbar, but either way, it's metaphorical.)

Here's to hoping your New Year's Eve was less excessive than mine, I guess.

* Well, maybe not liver failure.