(picture above not directly related to entry)
July. The most dangerous month of the year to be in the hospital, but also the month with the freshest faces.
The interns with bright coats and loaded pockets rush from room to nurse to computer to attending, trying to stay afloat in the miasmal maelstrom.
One of the new nurses pops up in front of me to discuss our patient. She’s in the prime of her life – young, thin, chipper, bright eyed – so shiny. Her uniform is crisp and clean like her hair. All of this will change.
The medical students and nursing students smile just for the fact that they aren’t cooped up in a library anymore. So eager to impress and please and get dirtied by this huge rusty healthcare machine. As if this is the greatest job on Earth.
At the end of the day, myself and two other colleagues congregate in our little office room, finishing up electronic notes on computers and answering pages.
Finally one hangs up the phone and says, “Ack! This is too stressful!”
“I know,” I say while double-checking patients I’ve seen today.
“I need to do something else with my life,” she continues.
“Like what?”
“I think I’d like to be a teacher or a real estate contractor.”
“A what?,” I ask, trying to understand what seems like the opposite of fun to me, ”Hahaha! Have you dabbled in real estate before?”
“Well, no, but I love looking at new houses.”
“What kind of teacher?”
“Maybe really young kids or college aged, but not the ones in between.”
“You could volunteer in your kid’s class.”
“Yeah, but they give me a headache. Maybe teaching isn’t such a good idea.”
“If you could do anything,” I ask my other colleague, “What would your dream job be?”
“Me? Hmm. Photography. For National Geographic.”
“That is really cool,” I say realizing this is the first non-work conversation I’ve had with this colleague in our several year acquaintance. “Do you get to do a lot in your spare time?”
“Try to. But at the end of the day, sometimes just loading the pics off my camera is all I can muster. The days here are so exhausting.”
We all nod.
“What would you do?” someone asks me.
“Something where I could write and draw. And paint. Like my own comic book,” I say to a shocked audience of two. I wonder what they thought I would say. Golf? Build miniature galleon replicas? I wonder.
“My spouse doesn’t want me to change jobs now. ‘You’re finally out of residency and making some money,’ he says. But this is just too much.”
“Yeah.”
“This is not my dream job,” I quietly understate against the machine.
“Ha! More like my nightmare job.”
“One of my patients this morning, the one with angioedema,” I say, “She asked if I could discharge her first thing tomorrow morning – because she LOVES her job and she wants to go back to work that afternoon. You know what she does? She’s a prison guard.”
“No way! That’s so – ”
“Dangerous and stressful, right? I didn’t get into details, but she said it’s the easiest job in the world and she loves it.”
“Wow.”
We sit quietly for a bit while giddily basking in our commiseration and revealed dreams as if saying them aloud made each a little more tangible, wondering what it must be like to love going to work every day.
I also wonder if I said too much.
A pager goes off. And then another. One person rushes off to the floor, another picks up a phone. For some strange reason, I am relieved.
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SOMEDAYS IT’S HARD TO BE A HAMSTA
