I’ve seen bedsores that I could put a basketball into. I’ve stood by patients vomiting blood and bile in pink plastic bins. I’ve listened to lungs while patients oozed bowel contents two feet from me. I’ve had my hands on a child’s pulsating brain. But there are still some things that freak me the hell out.
Like an unhinged fingernail. Especially mine.
I didn’t notice it until after my first match in jiu-jitsu practice today. Blood outlined my middle fingernail. Tiny dull ache. Looseness. ACKKK!!!
I hid it and tried to grapple without using my right hand much. I rightfully got choked, thrown around, and dominated. I really wouldn’t make a good jiu jitsu amputee champion. I felt badly about my performance but that’s the least of my concerns lately.
There’s some major cost cutting going on at my hospital. Support services are being dropped like N-bombs at a rapper convention (sadly, that’s the best analogy I could come up with). Since hospitalist groups rely on some of these services (such as overnight physicians and palliative care), this may actually affect whether I can still work at my current hospital or not in the coming months. I am sure that just about everyone who is reading this has gone through more job shakeups or relocating than I have, but I’m going to bitch anyways. After training for ten of my adult years living the life of a cloistered monk in a monastery, I would have thought job security is at least one thing a doctor can rely on. I guess the only constant in a physician’s career is the fact that we’re all involved in a lawsuit, more than once (some statistics say eight times).
This got me thinking of money and in particular, the money I give to my mom every month … which I resent. It’s not that I resent helping my mom out, but it’s the fact that no matter how much I give her, just enough or more than enough, she always ends up with zero or worse. I resent that the money we give her could be used for the kids college savings or our retirement. I resent that she neither exercises her ever-fattening body nor even tries to get a minimum wage job – both of Amy’s parents work and exercise and are financially independent. I resent that she thinks I’m giving money to Amy’s relatives when in fact, they get nothing from us. I resent that despite her joblessness, she has never been able to clean the tiny house she lives in. I could clean that pig sty in two days, but she won’t let me or my brother touch or throw away anything.
Amy even set up health insurance for her, and she stopped paying for it. I can just imagine her having a major stroke at any time – I’ve seen it in much younger, healthier people in the hospital. The expense of either a nursing home or home care would drain what I have saved.
My thoughts on this matter are selfish, considering this is the single mother who raised my brother and me. The same woman who raised me to be independent and strong in life. To be ruthless and vengeful in my academics. To think of your children above all others including your mother. This incongruity between what she made me and what she has become tears me in half. So I can only give her one of those halves. The practical side, in the form of money, or the emotional side, in the form of … I wouldn’t know.
So, I give her the side she actually asks for, the money. At least her grandkids can give her the other half now.
Sometimes my mom surprises me and chuckles when I make some sardonic remark toward her. In those moments I can see that she gets it – that I am giving what I am capable of giving. And I get it – that she loves me no matter how little I can return of it. That part’s not fair. But now that I have kids, I am beginning to understand the necessary unfairness of unconditional love.
It’s late and the throbbing under my fingernail has gone down. I may need to wrap it up. I wouldn’t want it to fall off and reveal any more of what’s beneath. I already know that it’s ugly.
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