vacation all i ever wanted, vacation had to get away

We finally got our spring schedules about a week ago, and I found out that I got my vacation request for a week off at the end of March, to match up with Joe's vacation. This will be the first vacation week that we've had off together since Cal was born (though I don't know if I would rightly count my first post-partum week of medical leave as "vacation") so we've decided that we're going to take a our first big family trip and get the hell out of Dodge. We just have to figure out where we want to go.

Here's a quick list of the things we're looking for in a vacation spot:

• Warm. Because New York in the winter is...not warm. And we want to get away from it all, like in those commercials showing some lady running down the beach holding a gauzy scarf waving in the wind behind her, all carefree. Why are you carrying a scarf on the beach, lady? Also, I think Cal might enjoy the beach, with the appropriate hat and SPF 900 sunblock.
• Not too far away. We took Cal down to Baltimore in the car to visit family a couple of weeks ago, and he did fine on that four-hour trip, sleeping most of the way. But I don't think that, with his first air travel experience, we should push it. Maybe a three-hour-ish flight would be good, factoring in the boarding time and the inevitable delays. He's good, but put me on a 12-hour flight to Hawaii and even I start crying. (I mean, until I get there.)
  
• Family-friendly. This is why Cancun during the height of Spring Break is probably out. Too many inebriated college students hanging out of the windows naked screaming"Class of 2006! Woo!" before pushing a flaming mattress into the pool.
• No cruises. I hate cruises.
  
• Cheap is a plus. Because of the monies, or lack thereof.

So one obvious location from the above criteria is Florida. Cal actually does have a passport (we got one for him a few months ago), but domestic flights would surely be cheaper. That said, I don't know anywhere to go in Florida, aside from Disney World, which is just a total rip-off, and besides, Cal's too young to understand the whole amusement park thing. (He's also too young to understand the whole concept of unwrapping presents, which is why I didn't wrap any of his toys up for Christmas. What's the point, wrapping it up just so I could unwrap them myself hours later?) Where do people go in Florida? Miami? Tampa? Ft. Lauderdale? Why do these all sound like places where people's grandparents live? Grandparents with a bowlful of dusty ribbon candy.

Bermuda is a nice place to go, and only about a two hour flight away, but I just think it's not going to be warm enough in March to go swimming. The Bahamas is further south, and I think it's cheaper to stay there too (Bermuda has gotten all blue-blooded and pricey in the past decade--damn you, Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones!) but I don't know how much the flights and hotel cost. Puerto Rico might be a nice option, but that's ever farther than the Bahamas, and I don't really know anything about Puerto Rico outside of what I learned from the annual Puerto Rican Day Parade here in the city (which mainly means that I can identify the Puerto Rican flag, in flag, T-shirt or beaded necklace form).

Or are all these vacation spots just way too obvious? Or should we go somewhere else cool and different, like Arizona or Oregon or Portugal or someplace like that? Keeping in mind that those locales violate one if not all of our stipulations for vacations spots? Because of their farness and coldness and expensiveness? What to do? Where should we go?

Back to obsessively checking the Travelocity site for good deals.

Currently reading: This article in the Times, which is vindicating our choice to let Cal sleep in our bed with us, at least for now. But seriously, how else am I supposed to ever see him, or get any sleep myself? Nice to see that we're not the only ones who feel this way, and that this doesn't make us crazy hippy long-hairs. Or, you know, Michael Jackson.

christmas word roundup

So we had a very nice Christmas. (Santa Christmas, not Jesus Christmas.) We saw family, Cal's enjoying his new toys, and Joe and I relished in our new Christmas morning tradition--jamming plastic widgets into other plastic widgets. From now on, I'm only buying toys that say "no assembly required." Either that, or floor samples.

Christmas Eve, as usual, we spent with my parents. We had dinner out at a restaurant, and Cal behaved himself reasonably well, or at least I assumed, as I didn't catch any dirty looks from my cursory surveillance of the dining room. He even managed to make a little girlfriend--actually what happened is that this girl, who was about two years old, came up to our table pointing and squealing, "LOOK DADDY, A BABY, A BABY!" We made some nice small talk with the dad, introduced our kids (the little girl was named Rowan) and basically let the two of them have their fun. On our way out of the restaurant, we stopped by their table to say goodbye, and I noted that Rowan's mom looked familiar. Though not until I got to the coat check did I realize that the reason she looked so familiar was because she was Brooke Shields. And that's my obligatory New York celebrity-spotting story of the season.

(Although, being a Too Cool For School New Yorker, I had to pretend how I TOTALLY DIDN'T CARE and didn't once crane my head to look back to gape at BROOKE FUCKING SHIELDS. Because I am too cool. FOR SCHOOL. But then I was proud at Cal for being such a ladies man to attract the attentions of celebrity offspring. An older woman, even. Now, as someone pointed out, all he has to do is befriend Tom Cruise's fetus, and then we would have a true love triangle.)

Despite all the angst of my previous postings, work has both fun and satisfying as of late, though I've come to grips with the fact that I think I'm essentially what I would classify as a High Stress Personality. Even when things are going well, I'm landing all my procedures, happy patients wheeling into the recovery room, I have secret stress bubbling underneath the surface. For instance, last night I had a purely aural dream, in which I dreamed that I was listening to the sound of a patient's pulse ox tone. No images, no plotline, just sound. Beep...beep...beep. LISTENING FOR DESATS IN MY DARK BEDROOM AT 2AM. Now tell me that doesn't make me officially crazy. I also think I'm taking this "constant vigilance" credo of Anesthesia one step too far. I think we're actually allowed to let down our guard when we leave the hospital to go home at the end of the day.

OK OK OK, so are all the movies I want to see:

• "Brokeback Mountain," though at this point, it's so hyped up that I'm sure I'll be disappointed. Unless it really is THE GREATEST MOVIE OF ALL TIME, in which case I won't be.
  
• "Match Point," because it's the first Woody Allen movie in a long time that sounds like it might not totally suck (even if it is basically "Crimes and Misdemeanors" set in London. That said, "Crimes and Misdemeanors" was an excellent movie.)
• "Memoirs of a Geisha," because I liked the book, and because everyone keeps telling me that my youngest sister looks like Zhang Ziyi and I have to assess this for myself. (And no, you cannot date her, internet suitors! She's only in high school! Hands off, sex perverts!)
• "King Kong." No, actually, I don't want to see that. Well, maybe I do. Or maybe I don't. I can't decide.
• "Munich." See above.
• "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire." No, I still haven't seen this yet. Stop yelling.
  

What I really need to do is go to Chinatown and get me some pirated DVD versions of these movies so I can watch them in the peace and quiet (and cheapness) of my own home. But there is such a large margin of error for these Chinatown pirate DVDs. On one hand, you might get an actual pirated copy of the movie. And on the other end of the spectrum, you might get the footage that someone shot in the theater with a hand-held video camera, wih heads bobbing up and down in front of the screen and the sounds of people whispering and coughing. Which could be fun in that "Mystery Science Theater 3000" kind of way, but only for a few minutes.

Currently reading: "Anesthesia Secrets." I am scared of this exam that I'm supposed to take. Because it's supposed to chart the learning and progress that I've made in the past six months, and I'm a little apprehensive that on paper, the academic quantification of all this learning and knowledge is going to tally up to some very tiny number. However, I can now turn over my OR and do my machine check or jam a needle into your spine lickety-split. Wish they would test me on that.

christmas photo roundup
















Currently reading: Patient charts for my cases tomorrow.

they're back!



Oh, I missed you. Let's never fight again.

Currently reading: "Firestarter." Found my old dusty copy at my parents house and picked it up.

contingency plans

So yeah, the transit strike. I can't believe they actually did it. Meet the Fockers! Don't they know it's cold outside? And that I live 11 miles from the hospital? AND WHAT OF THE EARLOBE-SHATTERING COLDNESS?

Side-taking and name-calling aside, I think we're all in agreement that this transit strike has brought this city right to its knees. It has also activated our Worst Case Scenario Contingency Plan. Georgia, you see, cannot get into the city. She lives all the way the hell out there in Brooklyn, near Coney Island or some such place. Maybe she lives under the Cyclone, like Woody Allen in "Annie Hall". Well, wherever she lives, the fact of the matter is that we have no childcare. So unless I could somehow bring Cal to work with me (wrap him in sterile gauze, maybe, or put a little mask and cap on him and prop him up against some foam padding in the corner) we had to come up with a good alternative solution, and quickly.

I don't know if it was a good solution, but all I could do yesterday was all in to work and say that I couldn't make it in. I know we didn't have much choice, but I have never in all my years of residency missed a day of work for illness or otherwise, and oh my land, yesterday the guilt was EATING ME ALIVE. With tartar sauce. This morning, we tried to work out some shenanigans with getting a car service to pick Georgia up in Way The Hell Out There in Brooklyn, and got assurances from the dispatcher that yes, they would pick her up, yes, no problem, they promised, yes yes yes. Then at 4:30am we got a call that oops, they didn't have enough cars to dispatch after all, so forget all that stuff we talked about yesterday. Fockers!

Luckily, we had a Plan B in place, having packed a bag with some bottles and the trusty Pack 'n' Play the night before. All I can say is: thank god for grandparents. By 5:15am, Cal was bundled up, in the car, and speeding uptown to the Upper East Side. By 5:45 he was happily drooling on a brand new set of absorbant surfaces. I called it our Adventure Morning, but really, I'm not sure how many more "adventures" like that I can stomach, pushing a stroller and carrying fifteen tons of baby gear across Madison Avenue at dark o'clock in the morning.

So now Cal's with my parents, Joe and I made it to work before dawn, and I'm waiting for my first patient to show up. And I'm on call tonight. How the hell am I going to get home tomorrow morning?

Dear MTA, please start up the subways again. Pretty please. I'll give you five dollars.

turnover time

Cal learned to flip over from front to back sometime last week. According to reliable sources, he was so freaked out by his accomplishment that he started crying immediately, and took almost 20 minutes to calm down. Of course, I wasn't there to see it. I was on call. Joe told me about it over the phone. After making sure that the baby didn't smother and checking on his psychological well-being, I hung up the OR phone and turned back to my patient, a 91 year-old woman getting a total hip replacement. "My baby just learned how to flip over while I was at work," I told the orthopedics resident.

"Table up, please," he said in response.




There are good days and there are bad days. On the good days, being a working mother is totally doable, no problems, I can take care of my patients and take care of my family too, no sweat, because I AM A GOD. And on the bad days, I'm just very very tired. (As of late, Cal has started switching over to kind of a reverse-cycling schedule, such that he's been feeding a lot more when I'm home from work then when I'm not. Since I spend so much time away during the day, I really don't mind this, so no need to avail me of information on how to break him from this habit. In my rich fantasy life, I tell myself it's because he LOVES ME and MISSES ME and LOVES THE BOOBIES. But the reality of it is probably more that it's awesome to eat in bed.) So on those days I'm a little fuzzy with my patients, and when I get home, the baby is asleep or getting there, and I just sit there trying to cram in as much quality time into those two hours before bedtime as I possibly can, wondering what other wonderous new skills he learned during the day that I missed being there for. Last I heard, he learned to drive.




So yes, sometimes, there is ambivalence. I don't know if I'm going to get busted on this, but I've always been full disclosure about The Real Deal with respect to residency, and I'm conviced that enough other people feel like this that it needs to be said. Some days I feel very lucky. I have a beautiful baby, and I'm in a coveted residency at a great institution, and I'm almost certainly going to have a good job and a flexible lifestyle coming out of it. But then some other days, I wonder whether or not the trade-off is worth it, missing the first three years of my kid's life (the daylight hours, anyway) as well as innumerable other intangibles for the sake of my medical training. I've talked with a lot of my former med school classmates about this issue, and though most of them don't have kids, it's unbelievable how many people feel the same way--torn between feeling lucky and ungrateful for their opportunities, and longing to walk away from it all and just have A Real Life like everyone else our age.




I'm not talking about quitting my job, of course. That would be short-sighted and impractical, and besides, even during my lowest lows, I don't think that staying home with Cal full-time would be the kind of life I would want either. But sometimes I do wonder why I switched residencies at all, adding another two years of training to my life. Why, if I'd stayed in Peds, I could be done in six months, and work part-time moonlighting in the ER or the PICU starting around Cal's first birthday. I could have made my own hours, made a decent living (certainly not much less than I'm making now) and just generally be there the next time he learns to sit up or talk or operate heavy machinery. I would be there.




But you don't make a career out of moonlighting, and at some point Cal's going to be going to school, and I'm going to need--to want--a "real job," something that will pay the bills, or the college tuition in the long run. And the fact of the matter is, I've gone to school for a long, long time, and there is a sense of obligation to want to make something of that. These are the rational arguments that I have with myself. But then, as one of my co-residents once said, "Sometimes I have to tell myself, 'Well, I should be grateful, it's not the worst job in the world.' But then agin, I didn't go through all this training just to have the second-worst job in the world."




Does saying all this make me feel like an ungrateful wimpy whiner? Yes, of course. Does saying that I want to spend less time being a doctor and more time being a mother make me feel somehow anti-feminist and regressive? Sure, sometimes. Do I remember that residency is, above all, temporary, and while I may spend five years as a resident, I then get to be an attending for the rest of my life? Yes. Do I realize that I have a pretty good life, and that I should see the glass as half-full? Hell, beyond half-full, three quarters-full. Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. But are there still days that I feel ambivalent or conflicted about the choices that I've made?




I think I've answered that one already.