Juxtapose

Work was a trainwreck today. Crying patients followed me everywhere, family members calling and telling me to tell the doctors things like, "I think the doctor should do something about the way that my mother doesn't exercise! I am a very involved son, I call my mother at least once a month to check up on her but I can only do so much, being that I live in Florida!" Sometimes I'm almost glad for the doctors that round on the patients and don't ask my opinion, just because at some point, my brain is so saturated that when they ask me, I am too tired to put it all together and ask what I need. Sometimes. Other times I have to play phone tag for hours with providers who just don't seem to understand - I'm here, all day, with their patients, and I *do* know what's going on.

Among other things, I busied myself with trying to discharge a (very nice) attorney to home and all this stuff kept coming up - missed paperwork, difficult-to-get-a-hold-of doctors, absent prescriptions - and I just couldn't get that poor man out the door. All in all, this discharge, which should have taken me fifteen minutes, dragged out for four hours. The guy was patient and kind but understandably ready to go home after a week's stay. Sometimes it seems like everybody needs something from you, the docs need you to recite patients' labwork to them off the top of your head, CT scan is calling for your patient that just had a stroke, pharmacy needs you to clarify this med, your new admission is actively infarcting and you're watching their troponins skyrocket while the aide is asking you if Mrs Congestive Heart Failure can have the large Dunkin Donuts coffee that her overly-sympathetic daughter just brought in. Sometimes, there is so darn much going on that when a patient starts to cry because they're just so overwhelmed with being in the hospital, you're too full up of things to do that you don't have even one spare minute to sit and talk with them. You just have to hand them a tissue, scritch their foot sympathetically for a second, and tell them to take it day by day - it'll be over before they know it.

And then you leave to go take on the next crisis.

I'm surprisingly well put-together at work. I don't stomp my foot, I don't really tell people when I'm frustrated, and I don't stop to talk to other people about what might be bothering me. I've cried twice at work, I think, both when I was completely overwhelmed at the end of the day and didn't know how to finish what I had started, I couldn't be in enough places at one time. Other than that, I've been tear free and I usually squeak out a smile despite myself. But somewhere along the ride home, right about where I hit the tolls on the highway, this massive headache creeps along my temples and crawls down my hairline until I am throbbing and the sunlight is making me want to crawl under a rock. Sometimes, when Mark gets home, I am at the door like a forgotten puppy, bouncing around and elated like he's been gone for a month and left me locked indoors. Ten minutes later, I've dissolved into tears as my whole day rolls out of my eyeballs and I blow my nose into an infinite number of tissues. That's my stress relief, Mark is my stress relief, bless his poor, poor soul.

Anyways, I don't care too much about me, but a lot of the time, you can only give so much of yourself to people, and that is the part that makes me sad.