Resident Wife

How to Make the Phone Ring

Waiting for some crucial return phone calls? Don’t just sit there! Make that phone ring! Here’s how:

• Get in the shower,
• Or, finally relent and take the dog out after several minutes of the “Take Me Out Right Now” dance,
• Or, call the bank’s teleconnect line because you might as well balance your checkbook while you wait, and it’s almost noon, and who the hell returns calls during the lunch hour? When call waiting kicks in, hit “Talk” instead of “Flash” on your cordless phone, disconnecting both parties.

Once you’ve attended to the business at hand, breathe a sigh of relief and take the dog for a nice long walk. While you’re gone, you’ll get a call from a loved one six time zones away.

Memo To Dr. Evil

I've had a couple of residency rants festering for the past couple of weeks, but I've held off. I even wondered if I've been a bit too harsh; after all, most of the attendings are good people. They're just trying to make the best of a bad situation: a crooked system, pressure from above, a shortage of residents, etc. And they've been supportive during the current family difficulties. (Then again, said difficulties only required my husband to take a few days off. Considering that he was once called back to work several days early from much-needed sick leave, I'll call it even. Almost.) But other events of the last few days have cured me of the Stockholm Syndrome, and I've got vitriol aplenty.

So here's a clue, Dr. Evil: if you don't like working with residents, don't work at a goddamned teaching hospital. Then again, without residents around, who are you going to blame for your bad outcomes, even if it means lying and falsifying the record? Here's a helpful hint, free of charge: learn to do your goddamned job and you won't have to stoop to defamation and libel in order to keep it.

You're trying to cover your ass to avoid another malpractice suit. Yes, I know your history. Public information is such a wonderful thing.

I've got your number, asshole. And I'm a bitch with a long memory. May you suffer an iatrogenic injury at the hands of a physician as incompetent as you are.

Another Short Conversation

Me: "Does it bother you in any Oedipal way that my birthday is the same as your mother's?"

Husband: "Not 'til you mentioned it."

I Needed A Good Laugh

Just received The Gallery of Regrettable Food and Interior Desecrations. I laughed so hard that my face still hurts. (All hail Glamaha!) What I want to know is how the hell did Lileks get into my parents' basement?

It's been a trying week. The news of the world is depressing enough; add family issues, stir well, and let fester. Then drop $400 on snow tires and an oil change. (Note to tire manufacturers: "all season" my ass!) It's enough to make you want to hide in the root cellar with a blanket over your head.

But things are looking up. The family crisis has been resolved, and my husband goes to back to work tomorrow. You know a man's been under stress when he looks forward to working a 24-hour shift. My stress level has been much lower by comparison, but even I am looking forward the garden-variety crappy days of yore. Does two weeks ago count as yore?

Proof That I Was A Child Once...

...and that I didn't always loathe the Christmas season. I've felt like a miniature adult for as long as I can remember, so it's always strange to see photographic evidence to the contrary. It's also disconcerting that I bear an uncanny resemblance to the Chaos Demon my darling youngest niece. So, what are CC and I doing, anyway? Guarding Dad's Scotch, Argonath-style? Or is it "V for Victory"? My parents weren't exactly baby-boomer hippie types (understatement alert!), so maybe we're giving the Peace-On-Earth-Through-Superior-Firepower sign.

Peace costs, and freedom isn't free. God bless the US military. Thanks for keeping me and my loved ones safe and free.

On a lighter note, Merry Christmas, everyone. And in a shameless Blackadder ripoff, I wish you all peace, freedom, and a few less fat bastards eating all the pie.

204 Days And Counting

Residency sucks. That's the recurring theme around here. My husband and I expected it to suck; we knew it would involve hard work, low pay and long hours. That's how apprenticeship works. What frosts my ass, though, is that a good portion of those long hours of are spent on tasks that either A.) could be done by someone else, or B.) no longer have much educational value. Yes, it's a good thing to do as many intubations as possible, but with many other procedures, residents are filling staffing needs and not learning anything new. AliasJohn works in a very large, very busy hospital. By the end of his CA-1 year, he had filled the procedure quota set by his specialty board. He's been marking time for the last 18 months, receiving minimal instruction in anything that will help him pass his specialty boards. Alas, "minimal instruction" does not mean working fewer hours. He came home from a meeting dismayed that the program director was more concerned with getting everyone down to 79-hours-and-59-minutes a week than with hiring more staff.

Starry-eyed cynic that I am, I wasn't surprised in the least. According to the Beacon Hill Institute, Boston has the third-highest cost of living among the 50 largest US cities. Couple that with low Medicaid reimbursement rates, and it's no wonder that hospitals here are having trouble recruiting physicians. Yes, it's a problem. Know what, though? It is not the residents' problem. They are there to learn, not to compensate for poor reimbursement rates, an inflated real estate market, and poor resource allocation. (It's hard for me to be sympathetic to a hospital's "plight" when it was paying someone $600,000 a year for a no-show administrative job. Eventually the shit hit the fan and he was fired....) That's more than enough money to recruit a couple of freshly-minted attendings and physicians' assistants, so I'm not buying.

None of the above is anything new, and I've gone over it ad nauseum. So now I'll get to one of the specific reasons I'm so bitter about this whole process. I've never written about it, because I don't want to put out too much specific information about us. But this involves the hospital's blatant disregard for the health and safety of both its residents and patients, and I can't sit on it anymore.

Excuses, Excuses

I have been incredibly lazy about writing lately. Writing about politics gives me a headache, and since John Edwards, Ambulance Chaser isn't a heartbeat away from the Oval Office, I decided to give it a rest for a few days. Of course, a few days had now morphed into a month and a half. I was actually busy for the first week of the Slack Sabbatical. (Well, that's "busy" by my low-energy standards. It doesn't take much for me to get derailed and say, "Oh, the hell with it.")

First, there was my Exurban Adventure, which was supposed to involve staying at my brother's house and taking care of the animals while he and his wife were in California. There was a slight change of plan after one of the cockatiels attacked my legs. (Four bites, four bruises, minor bleeding.) Even though I got the thing back in the cage, it shrieked like a banshee and managed to peck the thermostat apart through the bars of the cage. Call me crazy, but I had no desire to freeze my ass off while having my eardrums shattered. So I brought his dog back to my house and spent the better part of a week schlepping twice daily to his house (where the zipcode is EIEIO) to feed the rest of the menagerie. I had brief evil thoughts about letting the fucking bird starve to death, but the other cockatiels were harmless, and I'd given Big Brother B my word. Going home wasn't much of a relief, because I had to keep the dogs separated and do Double Duty Walkies because my mellow middle-aged mutt did not get along the perky puppyish purebred. When it was all over, I found myself muttering "I am never doing anyTHING for anyBODY ever again!" Not true, of course, but it didn't do much for my mood.

I followed this misadventure by hurting my back in the silliest way possible. In a decade-plus of waitressing, bartending, skiing, toddler-toting, and dance classes that required me to sign a waiver and bring a helmet, I never hurt my back. So how did I do it? Making the goddamned bed. I bent over to tuck in the sheet and got stuck like that. Why yes, I would like some insult with my injury! It's one of the joys of being a control freak with autoimmune problems: I never know what's going to hurt or why. There's no rhyme or reason to it. All right, wah, boohoo, poor me. That's a rant for another day. Back to my excuses for going dark.

Even under the best of circumstances, I'm prone to holiday blues bitchiness of Scrooge-like proportions. (Having said that, I now declare a moratorium on adaptations of A Christmas Carol. It's been done to death. So, unless it involves Scrooge vanquishing the ghosts with a rocket launcher while screaming "Get out of my house, you spectral bastards!", I'm just not interested.) I thought I'd feel better if I got off my ass to write, so I fired up the blog. Lo and behold, comment spam. For God's sake, my readership is so tiny that I'd be embarrassed to put up a hit counter. Why would anyone bother? Ugh. I removed it, muttering obscenities the whole time and wondering why I bother. But I'll only be derailed by my own laziness; I won't let some link whore push me out. See? Control freak. "Get out of my blog, you spamming bastards!"

Time to dust off all the half-written posts festering in limbo. I'm back.

Yobbo Nation

Confession: I'm not much a sports fan. But an odd confluence of circumstances has piqued my interest in the World Series this year. I'm taping tonight's game for my father-in-law, a big Sox fan who is visiting the U.K. branch of the family. He left when the Sox were down 3 to the Yankees, so the poor guy must be jonesing by now. Constant baseball coverage has left me longing for Cooperstown; my husband did a couple of rotations there during medical school and we both fell in love with the area. (Of course, I had no idea the Baseball Hall of Fame was there until I saw the signs on the drive out.) And Cooperstown-longing makes me think about baseball, and why I've never been a big fan.

I have vague memories of the 1975 World Series, when the Red Sox lost to Cincinnati. But, being six at the time, I didn't really care. I spent the ensuing decade having a geeky, unathletic childhood and adolescence, and probably couldn't have named more than three guys on the team. Then the inescapable hoo-hah of 1986 drew me from my navelgazing long enough to watch the Sox lose to the Yankees. The Bill Buckner incident put me off baseball, but not in the way most people think.

The vitriol directed at Buckner was disgusting, and a perfect example of why I find pro sports such a turnoff. I have great appreciation for a thing done well, so it's not the sports or athletes per se; it's the goddamn fanatics! (I use that word to distinguish them from fans--you know, the ones who aren't fucking insane.) Yes, Buckner missed that grounder, but that was Game 6. Then the team blew Game 7, which still could have won them the Series. Why acknowledge that when you have a scapegoat handy? The kind of idealization and devaluation that would be a red flag for a personality disorder in an individual is par for the course among rabid sports fans. Add alcohol and the ever-logical desire to celebrate victory with destruction and general assholery*, and then count me the hell out.

On Saturday, I had to do some asshole-dodging. My brother-in-law brought my niece to Game 1; they parked at my house and took the train in to avoid traffic hassles. When I met them at the station after the game, I jumped up and waved my arms over my head (rather than screaming "HEY, PETE!" at 1:30 am in a residential neighborhood.) Before Pete spotted me, though, I managed to attract the attention of a group of yobbos a bit behind him; they started waving, whistling and yelling stuff like "Hey, beautiful! You want some of this, baby?" I've never understood catcalls: what do these guys think is going to happen? That I'll say "I've been waiting for you all my life! Now rip my clothes off, you beast, and take me rudely from behind!"???

Anyway, Pete (who still plays hockey at 40+ and has the bearing of a man who can administer an old-school hip check) spotted me during the catcalls. He yelled "There you are!", walked purposefully in my direction, and the yobbos shut up immediately. (Miraculous, no?) Obnoxious as they were, there was no harm done. But I'm less sanguine about what will happen after tonight's game, especially if the Sox win it.

Last week, (Thursday?) in a horrifying example of crowd control gone awry, a woman died after being hit in the eye when the police fired pepper balls into a crowd. The investigation is ongoing, but this scares the hell out of me no matter what actually happened. Marauding fans scare me, but police going overboard with allegedly nonlethal weapons scare me even more.

It's 3-0, Sox, bottom of the seventh right now. I'm going to go lock the doors.

*OK, so maybe assholery isn't a word, but God damn it, it should be.

Flu Shot Accomplished!

I brought the Beloved Upstairs Relative (BUR) for his flu shot today. People must have stayed away in droves, because we were in and out of the clinic in half an hour. Instead of the usual cattle call, it was just a small group of elderly people.

But of course I have something to complain about! Anyone who knows me (or reads my rantings) knows that I'm not a fan of government interference. I'm always on the lookout for the thin end of wedge (I prefer "enlightened self interest" to "paranoia"), and it is absolutely chilling when the government threatens physicians with fines and jail time for not following orders. (After all, physicians are too greedy, stupid and corrupt to ever suggest to young, healthy people that they're not likely to die for lack of a flu shot. Gag.)

Public Health Commissioner Christine Ferguson said the state, facing an unparalleled shortage of flu shots, had to direct vaccinations to people most likely to die from the illness, such as very young children, seniors over 65 and people with chronic medical conditions.

"It's not rationing," she said. "It's being rational about how to reduce the number of deaths that could result from a serious flu season."

Yes, it is rationing. A frosted dog turd is not a wedding cake*. Insisting that said frosted dog turd is not actually a frosted dog turd but a wedding cake does not make it a wedding cake. So let's call a spade a spade, Ms. Ferguson. (Note that it's not Dr. Ferguson; she's an attorney. Surprise, surprise.)

So what's next? Fining and jailing healthy people who have the unmitigated gumption to ask their physicans for a flu shot? Aren't they just as "guilty"? After all, people are too greedy, selfish and corrupt to pass on such a thing unless they are coerced. (Gag.)

I don't remember where I first heard the dog turd thing, so thank you, Mr. Author Unknown.

Sprechen Sie Deutsches, Herr Katz?

Nein? You're welcome. So why point out that "parts of America have become so isolationist that even the idea of individuals receiving letters from foreigners is enough to give politicians the collywobbles?" Are you afraid of what will happen if the U.S. doesn't bail you out next time you have to pay Neville Chamberlain's tab? Can you say "Couldn't have done it without you?" Nah, I didn't think so.

So go ahead, Mr. Katz. Tease the bear. But don't be "shocked by the volume and pitch of the invective directed (your) way" when you do. And since you find scatology eye-wateringly unpleasant, may you be visited by the twin demons of tenesmus and fecal impaction.

Hat tip to Monica, who is lives in the belly of the beast.
Update: Fixed dead D-Day link.