I Love Sunday!

I should clarify: I love whichever day of the weekend is my off day!! This morning the alarm went off and I was already awake because my body wakes up at 5:19 every morning (no kidding, 19 after not 20, every day) out of habit. But today, glorious day!, I got to turn the alarm off and sleep another 4 hours!!! Oh, glorious Sunday. And then I just putzed around the house with Eric like an old married couple, and it was just so fantastic.

This week I worked 78 hours and admitted 5 out of 6 days. If I was wasn't a med student, I would have been dangerously close to maxing out on the 80-hour work week. I was (and still am) completely exhausted. There's a moment at about 7:15pm every night where I realize the time, then I realize how much there is left to do, and I get the slightest bit freaked out and stressed about how ridiculous my life is going to be for the next 5 years or so. I never see the sun anymore (the funny thing about Dave's post is, I know exactly what I would do--I would just go to work like usual because the sun doesn't rise until I'm already holed up in a windowless room).

But it's not a bad exhaustion, usually, except for when things get sad. People at big academic centers like UPMC are really, really sick - they've been bumped from home doc to small community hospital to medium city hospital, then finally get sent to us because they're so complicated and so sick. Some of those really sick people are young people like you and me who happened to get dealt a crappy hand in life. Often they've gotten poor care from confused and untrained doctors on the outside. Other people are sick for a while, get better and you're happy because they're going home!, ...and then you find out they came back the next day and are in the ICU, or that the pneumonia you found on their CT scan was actually lung cancer, and they died in hospice a couple of weeks later. Those were all patients I had this and previous week. Sometimes I wonder how anybody can have a career that is filled with so much sadness, so much guilt and feelings of hopelessness.

But really, for the most part, it's been a fun and extremely fulfilling kind of tiring. I'm working with a great team that gives me autonomy but guides me at the same time. I'm getting to see some really interesting patients. I'm learning how to help people, and how to deal with our limits when they can't truly be helped. I'm learning how to be sad in a professional way when I learn my patients have died. And because of all this, not only am I learning to be a good doctor, I'm becoming more and more grateful for my own health and the health of those I love. I'm learning to be in awe of life and all of the opportunities it's granted me.

And so: I love Sunday, and you.