It's the hard-knock life



Moments before Ryan falls asleep.  He is tellling me about his horrific day!

It's the hard-knock life for us. It's the hard-knock life for us.  No one cares for you a smidge- when your in a residency!

Oh the life of a resident!  It really can't be beat.  The last 30 or so hours have gone down like this at our house.

Tuesday night, Ryan gets home from work around 6 pm with chills, fever and congestion.  He has been sick all day in the OR on his feet.  He has dinner, plays with his kids.  Goes to bed around 10 pm, falls asleep with 4 articles in his hand that he is supposed to have read by the next morning on anterior hip grafts because he will be assisting with one the next day.

Wednesday morning he gets to the hospital at 6:45am to round on patients.  Surgery almost always starts at 7:15am.  Ryan is in the OR all day -you know--for the anterior hip graft, and other surgeries. (Not sure if he got the articles read)

He walks in our door at 5:30pm on Wednesday night, has  been home 1 minute or less and his pager goes off--really.  He is on call until Thursday at 8:00am. A man with a severely infected tooth is on his way to the ER.  At 6:15 Ryan goes to the ER, cleans the infection and gets back home at 8:20pm.

At 8:30pm his pager goes off.  There is a post-op patient in severe pain, please call her. So he does. Then he calls in a prescription to Walgreen's. (Its kind-of weird to hear Ryan call himself Dr. Swigert and talk all Dr-like and prescribe pain meds etc. He sounds pretty hot when he does it--anyways I think so!)

He gets off the phone by 9:15 and eats dinner, plays with Jace and Grace and we put them to bed.  Around 10:15 his pager goes off again.  The ER tells him that an 84 year old man who had several extractions at the dental clinic a few days prior bumped his mouth and can't get the bleeding to stop.  Please call and talk to his wife.  So he does.

He gets off the phone by 10:40 and tells me that he will have to go in to see this patient.  The patient lives a little ways from the hospital.  They will probably not get there until 12:30 or 1 am.  We both feel bad for this 84 year old man and his 80 year old wife who have to drive to the hospital late at night.  I also feel bad for my sick, exhausted husband.  Ryan goes to bed.  I hear his pager go off at 1:20am.  I tell him goodbye.

I sleep lightly and have weird dreams waiting for Ryan to get back from the hospital. I worry about him.  I wake up completely at 5:14am.  Ryan is not home. I know his day starts at 6:00am with pre-rounding on patients and I assume he is asleep at the hospital.  I don't call him and go back to sleep and sleep until 8 am.

By 3:00pm I have heard nothing from Ryan.  I assume he is dead in a ditch somewhere. Not really-but the thought crosses my mind that maybe he fell asleep driving home from the hospital at 3am this morning and drove into a ditch.

At 4:00pm I text him.  Nothing.  I assume he is in surgery.

At 5:15 he walks in our front door EXHAUSTED and HUNGRY and I hear the rest of the story.

He never went to sleep last night.  He got finished re-shaping the 84 year old man's maxilla with a bone file, suturing, and thermal cauterizing by 4:00am.  Then a man with a buccal space infection came in, and it had to be treated immediately, it couldn't wait until the next day.  So he dealt with that until 5:15. 

He then had 45 minutes to get dressed in clean scrubs and move his car out of valet parking and pre- round on patients by 6:00am.  Not sure if he got breakfast.

He then faced a full day of surgery. During his 11:00am case, the patient wouldn't stop bleeding after surgery. It was supposed to end at 12:00 noon.  It took until 1:45 to get things under control.  He MISSED lunch and was 45 minutes behind the rest of the day.

But he finally gets home.  He takes a nap on the couch while Jace, Grace and I fix dinner.  We make salad and steam broccoli.  We are missing a main dish, so I load up the kids and go to Papa Murphy's for take and bake pizza.  Their garlic and white sause pizza with chicken, bacon and artichoke hearts is sooo good! We eat, he goes home teaching until about 8:45 pm. We put kids to bed and he is now in bed snoring next to me.

And guess what---it all starts over again tomorrow!  That's right! He is on call Friday--and then again on Sunday--and it goes round and round for 3 more years!

And to top it all off -my pictures won't post tonight. Frustrating! It's a hard-knock life for a blogger too! You'll have to check back later to see all the pictures I took of him asleep on the couch. No butt shots though --sorry.  It's the hard-knock life!!