Friends

Hello out there,

The sky threw up on us today. It spent the night wretching with dry heaves, but by morning, it was full-blown "sky vomit." It rain/iced all day. Ice came falling from the sky and stuck to every surface it came into contact with producing an invisible slippery glaze. I noticed it when I stepped out of the house this morning and suddenly found myself clear across our back patio head first into the recycle bin.

I knew that today would be a lousy one. Why did I keep going? I should have gone back to bed. Mike said the girls slept in until almost nine today. Another good reason to have turned around and gone back into the house.

Instead, I recovered from my visit to the recycle bin and dug through the empties to find all of the stuff that had fallen out of my white coat pockets during the little mishap. I cut my hand on an empty can of sauerkraut. (Who does that?!?) At least I think sauerkraut is sterile...no bugs could ever live in it, so I don't think I need antibiotics.

Then it was off to work: pediatrics. I had been on call Friday/Sunday and had thirteen (another good sign) patients to round on. Before I had to be at a meeting at noon. A meeting which my advisor from work had scheduled and refused to let me postpone despite the fact that I slept zero hours on Friday night and had slept two Sunday night. I was a complete zombie even after two cups of the gut-rotting coffee in the hospital cafeteria.

Another sign of a great day.

The first patient I saw was a kiddo with pneumonia whom I was planning on sending home today. Instead of feeling better, he was doubled over in pain and had poor breath sounds on his entire right side. Turns out the pneumonia was now an empyema and he needs a surgeon.

It was only nine o'clock.

The rest of the morning I spent rounding on my patients as fast as possible in order to get the work done on time. Rounding on kids is hard work. The parents have millions of questions for you and sometimes you just want to hand them Nelson's Textbook of Pediatrics and say, "just read chapter seventeen." Alas, I don't own that book, and even if I did, it probably would have died during my trip to the recycle bin (see above.)

At noon, I had to leave the peds floor for a meeting at the Family Practice Center...our residency clinic. The meeting was just plain lousy. In ways I can't say on this blog because anybody can read it and I could get Hosed for being more specific. Just go with me on this one.... The meeting was the equivalent of melena* or clostridium difficle diarrhea, shooting from a cannon, onto a neat stack of freshly pressed white bedsheets....for about an hour.

Anyways, this brings me to my point for the day. Before I went to this utterly poopy meeting, I called a friend of mine. I've known him since day one of medical school and he is my kids' doctor. I asked him to go to this meeting with me, to make things more bearable. Without a second thought, he came right away and sacrificed an entire noon hour to attend a meeting with me. And then, he called me tonight after work to reiterate how lousy the meeting had been and offered me his support for any future meetings I may have to attend.

After that, my darling husband poured me a glass of wine and fed me a bowl of chocolate ice cream. He listened as I complained about today, about the slice in my hand, the kid with the empyema, and the meeting from hell. As I was thinking about what I should blog about tonight, I had a thought: I am really blessed. I have a lot of good friends in this world. I have a husband whom I can depend on. I have wonderful people in my life who are willing to drop their free lunch hour to attend an awful meeting with me out of the kindness of their hearts, and then call my house to check up on me. I have friends who would put their reputation out on the line for me. I have friends who bring an extra #2 pencil to exams for me because they know I will probably forget. I have friends who ask if they can walk our dog when we're gone, friends who will pick me up from the car place when I have to drop off the car, and friends who buy two bottles of wine because they know I'd like one, too....especially if it's on SALE.

I guess that the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days put things into persepctive. If we didn't have the terrible ones once in awhile, we'd never really appreciate the great ones.

Here's to bad days and good friends. Let them both be here to stay!


*melena: bloody diarrhea that you see in a G.I. bleed. It is the most foul-smelling thing in the whole hospital.