This week. This everlovin' week

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Sipur Yisraeli

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Setbacks, nursing, Zika, failure

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Write a book

Would it be ok if it was just stories? Not stories linked together with trenchant analysis of what this means for Our Times, but just: this sad thing happened, or this happy thing happened, or lots of things occur and I have no other point than to show you that lives are hard but punctuated by great joy and great sorrow and here are some of those times that otherwise would be obscured from your view.

Is that a reasonable kind of book? Or does it need to be somehow More? (I have always thought it would need to be More. More makes me tired, so I just never get very far).

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Here's a possible title: "Every Little Thing Gonna Happen".

Because once I took care of a pregnant patient who had cardiac issues and renal failure and was in general very sick. Every time I took care of her in the office, I would talk about all the things we worried about, and she would say, very gently: "Hey, Dr. C. Hey. Ain't nothing gonna happen." When she got admitted to the hospital, I would tell her what we could, and couldn't do for her and her baby if things go worse, and she would say, very gently: "Hey, Dr. C. Ain't nothing gonna happen.".


And I would go tromping over to the nursing station to sit and write my note, and I would grumble: "That's her motto. We should make a t-shirt with that on it for our whole team. We could have hats, and wristbands: 'Ain't Nothing Gonna Happen'. "
"And I wish she was right, but I think I've been doing this for a while now, and you know what? Every little thing gonna happen. It just does, and it will. Every little thing."

That, to me is pregnancy, and L&D, and high risk and women's health and parentood. Eventually, around here, every little thing is going to happen: bad, good, in between. It's a whole world, over here.

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Anyway, is that a book? I thought so last night. Now I can't tell.
It's probably not, right? Probably not.

Cruel to be kind

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Delivering babies

I'm not gonna lie, delivering babies is a pretty awesome job.

It's only part of what I do, but when it is good, it is so very good.

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I talked to a friend who is moving to a consultative kind of job. It's her dream job in many ways, but it is the kind of job that usually doesn't involve any more delivering of babies. She said to me, when we were talking about it: "I bargained my way into some clinical time on L&D", she said. "They couldn't believe I wanted to be on Labor and Delivery"

"I get it," I said. "Of course. How can you not be on L&D? How can you be a credible consultant and tell people what to do when you're not in the trenches with them? And L&D is where everything good and everything bad happens."

"You got it. Everything good and everything bad." she said. "Next time I'm bringing you to the contract negotiation."

Twins

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Exactly how many Google calendars?

All this time I was jealous of people who had that expensive call-schedule-management software. Every time I was the subject of or dealt with a schedule snafu, the Bearded Economist would say: "You know, this is the kind of thing that computers are really good at."

And so I envied that expensive schedule management software. I thought you could plug in a bunch of rules (like, say, that doctors can't be in two places at once;  or that doctors can't work if they just worked a 24 hour overnight shift). Then you could copy in your holiday arrangements and let the magic happen. In a most beautiful world, it might notice if you signed in a for a shift that you weren't signed up for, and ask you what was going on. I bemoaned my 19 Google calendars* and the constant view and review required to assess for mistakes, and then stomach-curdling feeling when often, an entirely different mistake had occurred anyway.

Anyway, I was talking to a friend with that fancy software, and you know what? It's not actually that amazing. It's not programmable. It doesn't think. It's mostly just a shared place to keep the calendar, the calendar that a fallible human still has to make. It has some great associated features, like the ability to text or call someone directly from the schedule or other such thing.

Anyway, it's not actually that much better than my 21 Google calendars**, is what I'm saying. And the mistakes I try so hard to avoid, as a human, are not yet avoidable by obtaining a robot overlord. So I feel a bit better now.



* And counting; I'm spending a ridiculous amount of time considering whether to split one of these calendars into 3. On a weekend. No, everything's going just fine, why do you ask?

**I went for it.

Post-call bits and pieces

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20 minutes

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Anatomy of a piece that wasn't

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Language Control

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I got nothin'

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