my husband's job--pt. II: CALL

i guess my last entry about my husband's job was more an explanation of what it was and some background explanation. my husband read it and said he was waiting for the bitching and whining part. i don't want the title of my blog to be misleading so on with the complaining.

i ended the last entry claiming that i HATE call. i do i hate it. it is responsible for lowering the quality of my life in ways that nothing in my life has yet done. as i explained when my husband is on-call he goes in as if it is a normal day of work (usually this is about 6am) but he has to stay in the hospital overnight. because he is a surgeon if someone comes into the ER with anything that could involve surgery of any kind he gets paged and has to come check on them. this seems pretty clear cut say if someone got stabbed, shot, etc. but if someone comes in complaining of a sharp pain in the abdomen ER people want him to come check if its the appendecisis. also he is the person who get paged if nurses have questions about any of the surgery's departments surgery. he is the one he gets the call if somebody who got surgery earlier in the day and later in the evening something is going on.

ok, what does this all mean. often it means he does not get any sleep the whole time he is in the hospital. if there are a lot of traumas (car accidents, stabbings, people falling from windows and trees, etc.) then he doesn't get a lot of down time. right now it is 5 in the afternoon and my husband is sleeping on our living room chair because he was on-call last night and he was able to sneak in a nap in the morning but in the nearly 36 hours he has got 3 hours of sleep.

the # of times he is on-call a month varies. at the lowest end he can work 4 and at the high end 8. usually he works about 6 calls a month. i find it very hard to deal with. i miss him terribly but also taking care of 4 kids all by myself without a break is trying. on this front i know a lot of women have it harder--women married to military men or men that have to travel for their jobs. sometimes his call will be all bunched up in the month and by the end of the stretch i am so angry, resentful, and sad. i feel abandoned. i feel like the hospital comes before the family ALL THE TIME. i feel resentful that his career choice has such negative impacts on our family and our marriage. i married my husband because he is my best friend and i love spending time with him but since he has started residency our marriage has changed. we also had twin boys 24 days into his residency which didn't help.

last june i had hit a point of it all getting a bit too much. i got shingles and i felt like i was going out of my fucking mind. i had to go running to some prozac. i got my daily 40 mg of prozac a day and i can deal with it but i don't like it.

"when the world is running down you make the best of what's still around"
the police