So it begins...

The semester, that is. I am teaching six courses this semester, and for those of you unclear with college parlance, that means upwards of 45 hours per week of class, marking and prep time, though I only get paid for 18. As my mother-in-law put it, that means I'll be marking around 1000 writing assignments in the next 15 weeks. It will be ok, right? Still, I could mark all day every day if it meant I didn't have to do a song and dance every week about the importance of writing and speaking "clearly, concisely and correctly," if I didn't have to ask members of my class to avoid speaking on a cell phone while I am lecturing, or tell someone that no, she could not bring her dog to class, or that even though your roommate came home drunk last night and you were too tired to come to class, you still miss out on attendance marks.

Oh, vey. Of course, who am I to complain? Kirk works upwards of 100 hours every single week and no, I do not exaggerate, (take that, my too tired to come to class students). I forget how tiring work is when I'm off during the summer, and going back in the fall makes me appreciate what he does day in and day out all the more. Maybe, just maybe, I realize, it isn't quite fair for me to nag him about the baseboards that aren't still done downstairs (ok, it might not be fair, but it's oh so hard to stop!). And sure, I have students tell me I need nicer clothes (and perhaps I could buy them if I didn't have to clothe a growing child first, and if I got paid for every hour I work, and if we weren't servicing our med-school debt), but if I make a mistake it's only embarrasing to me; no one is likely to die. I do sometimes forget that if Kirk makes a mistake, little babies and kids could very well die.

Last week, he had a very rough call night. "On-call" at his hospital does not mean you are at home waiting for your phone to ring; it means you go to work at 8 in the morning and are there until 9 (at least) the next day. It means that you deal with all the non-stable issues at night and admissions through the emerg. Generally, he is lucky to get three or four hours of sleep somewhere in that stretch. This night in particular, there was no sleep to be had. He had to "pronounce" a baby, which means declare him/her dead (I cannot even imagine the horror of this, both for him and the parents), and he also had to admit a baby who was transferred from another hospital immediately after birth. The baby' actual condition did not fit with the supposed cause of the condition and Kirk and his fellow resident did not clue into or act on this issue fast enough. In essence, they didn't call their staff soon enough in order to diagnose appropriately and get the baby into surgery. Luckily, nothing terrible happenned to the baby in the meantime, but what if it had? Tiny, new lives dying or close to dying; it must be a wierd and scary place to be in.

I don't feel I am particulary good at supporting him in these situations, and I don't quite know what that's about. As a parent, I can't even begin to comprehend how some of these babies, children and parents get through each day. But how do you support the person who is, as a health-care provider, directly involved in these crisis, but really is peripheral to the fact that a child, some mother's baby, is very ill or dying? What do you say to a person who has to declare babies dead? And put central lines in preemies? And has patients who have been hit by large trucks to the point they have lost all their skin from the waist down and the use of their legs?

Needless to say, sometimes throughout the journey/ordeal of this medical career, we become strangers to each other. In a way, I think that must happen in most marriages and at this point in time I'm undecided as to whether it's a terribly sad or perfectly normal thing. Maybe it's a bit of both? How can I hold on to the person I married? Or is this a better person?

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Ever gaining new knowledge of how these new-fangled technologies work, I've updated the comments section so anyone can post. Please let me know if you read this blog, especially if I don't know you. Lately, I've been considering the strangeness and wonderfulness of the blogosphere and can't believe it took me this long to discover some of them.