Sometimes, I surprise myself

It's been a crap week. An awful one that resulted in me showing up to work with two puffy eyes looking very decidedly ... well, asian and squinty. No offence, but boo to squinty puffy eyes!!

Thank goodness for Australia Day. I have newfound appreciation for the public holiday. Without it, I would have had to work for two weeks straight without a day off. With it, my long stint was cut to a mere 9 days straight. Yay! On the downside, we had an awful weekend. Non-stop steady stream of patients and that horror ward round of about 60 patients, most of which weren't on my team at the time. It was ugly, so I stayed back to help out Sunday night. My senior decided to be nice and let me have some theater time.

Now you see, most people would jump at the chance for theater time. It means being in the zone, the surgeon's zen garden where everything else can wait because we're all scrubbed up and it's up to whoever's NOT scrubbed to go deal with issues outside the operating theater. It's where time seems to fly and 3 hours hammering away at a hip seems like 30 minutes. So.. my senior thought he was doing me a favor. For me, I'm not too fussed about getting theater time at this stage. I figure that you could train anything and anyone to perform operations and there isn't really time at 9pm in the evening to get any real teaching. It was a mad scramble to get in, fix it and get outta there.

So anyway, I was called to theater on short notice while my colleague decided to be brave and carry my pager for me and sort out the patients in ED. We finished, I met him down in ED, we admitted two more patients requiring surgery, got changed out of our scrubs and were thankful to be able to go home to catch about 5+ hours of sleep before we were expected at work at 7am the next morning.

It was only when I was in the car on the way to work at about 6.40 in the morning that I realized I didn't have my wedding rings on. You have no idea what that feels like unless you've been through it yourself. I felt my heart go through the floor of the car, heard it splat on the ground and then go squish in the far distance as it bounced along the road to be squished again and again by each oncoming car. And that repeated itself the whole day. We searched and searched and there's no news of them yet. Oh, and that was only Monday. What a way to start the week.

And Tuesday was when I showed up as puffy squinty eyed girl getting sympathy from the nurses about the rings. Hell, I needed it. And then Weds, I think I got run down so much my body decided it had enough and chucked a fever. The nurses took my temperature during our outpatient clinics and it read 39.3C. The look of horror on their faces was awesome. The mad scramble to get me some panadol was good and it was a good reason to work a bit slower than usual. To be fair, I wasn't feeling right since Monday anyway and the temperature just made me feel more spacey and nauseated.

And then we have today, my ED day. Sorted through a bunch of inappropriate patient referrals that showed up at our registrar review clinic. Thank goodness ED wasn't busy at all. Only 2 patients to admit all day by 5pm! BUT.. a hella lot of clinic patients, incessant calls from GPs all over the south coast, and annoying calls from the wards through the pager. It was so bad someone rained pity on me when I went to return their page, exclaiming that she heard that practically the whole hospital had been paging me this morning and she's sorry I was so busy.

...

So here I am. Thursday night. Chinese New Year. With my plate of reheated mycoprotein fake chicken burger patties. Alone. Missing my hubby. In a different state, in a different town. Faced with the prospect of having to move again in as soon as a week as the worst case scenario. Without news of my lost rings. At 10ish at night after work, when I was supposed to have left work at 5pm. And yet, for the first time in a while, I felt happy. Maybe it's all relative. We should all be delegated uber-crap weeks, maybe have one every few months to make the humdrum seem like bliss. The awful reality of the public health system and how cruel it is shall be reserved for another day. Right now, I don't feel stressed, I don't feel tired. I'm happy that I made someone else happy today, that I was able to give them reassurance and establish trust before their major operations, that my patients have been all lovely and appreciative (except for two little bitches, but we shan't go there), that I got all my jobs done and have everything/everyone accounted for and that I called my grandpa and got him a bit excited when I told him I was able to go back and visit him in June in time for his birthday. And the best part is, I gets to see my hG in less than 24 hours =)