Twilight Weekend

Papaya Daddy and I squeezed our wedding and honeymoon into the two weeks available between him taking Step 1 of the Medical Boards (at the end of his 2nd year of med. school) and beginning clinical rotations for his 3rd year of med. school. We returned from California to Chapel Hill, opened our wedding presents, and he left the house at 5:00 a.m. the next morning to drive to a hospital over an hour away. This began a bruising one-month rotation that required him to work overnight every 4th night. Even on the days he didn't stay overnight, he usually returned fairly late - emotionally, mentally, and physically exhausted - to a wife who had been impatiently watching the window for his arrival for the past two hours. It was impossible for him to say with accuracy when he would be able to be home.

It was a tough way to begin a marriage, but fairly indicative of what subsequent years would be like. Save for a 1 month break between the end of med school and the beginning of residency, and a 2 month hiatus between the end of residency and the beginning of his job here, Papaya Daddy has worked a LOT of nights, weekends, and holidays. Some seasons have been easier for us to take, and some have been excrutiatingly hard (for example, when I came home from the hospital with our first baby and he left at 4:30 the next morning for a 36 hour shift, then continued to work q3 for the entire month). There were many days in the first two years of the Papaya's life where his daddy would leave for work before he awoke and return after he was already in bed.

Papaya Daddy's schedule here on the rez has been a LOT lighter than either med school or residency, but still included its share of nights and weekends. And I haven't grown to like them any better, especially with a growing family. Weekends of work aren't too bad, but I hate, hate, HATE the nights he's away all night. (My respect for single moms, or moms with deployed husbands, is extremely high!)

This past weekend he worked all night Saturday and Sunday night. He was the only doc at the health center, and in charge of both the ER and the inpatient beds. Often, he's able to catch an hour or two of sleep in the call room when things get quiet. But not this past weekend - he was up all of both nights, and handled some fairly intense trauma as well as serious medical emergencies.

[In case you're interested, the trauma included four drunk teenagers who "borrowed" Grandma's truck, careened off a cliff, and plunged 50 vertical and 70 horizontal feet, rolling the truck multiple times. The EMS guys had to repel down to them and pull them up on gurneys attached to ropes. Miraculously, only one boy had a hurt leg, and the rest were fine. They did, however, remain rip-roaring drunk and belligerent, completely oblivious to how blessed they were. Medical emergencies included an elderly patient who suddenly crashed, stopped breathing, and lost a heart rhythm, just as the secretary reported that bad weather had grounded all med-evac flights for that night. Papaya Daddy performed a speedy crash intubation worthy of the ER television show, then shocked her. He and his team were able to stabilize her and eventually a plane did get through & evacuated her down to Tucson.]

Anyway, the times Papaya Daddy was home - Sunday during the day and Monday during the day, he was mostly sleeping (while I tried to keep us all out of the bedroom and relatively quiet) or staring wearily into space. The weekend had a strange, twilight-zone feel to it.

But...there was also a sense of exultation underlying the exhaustion and disruption. Because, if all goes as planned, Papaya Daddy has worked his last nights ever in this job. He only has one weekend left to work. And in his new job, there will be no nights, no weekends, and no holidays. For the first time ever in our marriage. It seems too good to be true.

I hope we still like each other after we start spending consistent nights and weekends together!

The following picture has nothing whatever to do with the blog post I just wrote, but it's very cute so I'm posting it. Enjoy!