serendipti's Diaryland
Diary
10:14 p.m. - Sunday, Jan. 01, 2006
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2006 what what
by rumi: When I am with you, we stay up all night,
When you're not here, I can't get to sleep.
Praise God for these two insomnias!
And the difference between them. i brought in the new year in the call room at Illinois Masonic Hospital, sitting on my bed reading Angela's Ashes for about 6 to 8 hours straight, till my eyeballs made that plip sound every time eye blinked, because there was not enough lubrication for the lid. and lemme tell you, that book is no upper. I was devastatingly depressed the entire time.....McCourt's writing is sick, its so brilliant. Just unreal. I know a lot of you have read that book, but just in case you have not, this is my plug. And so I was reading the last 60 or so pages when midnight hit, and I heard some popping noises and saw the bit of sky out the window of the call room light up like there was lightning, and I knew those were the fireworks and I knew it was new years, and I didn't want to be on the ward or in the lounge with people I knew for 3 days and then decline champagne when everyone wanted to toast and whatnot....and last year I had to kissdodge the best man at midnight at my best friend's bachelor/ette party and later tell the cheesy Indian boys as I hand them back the drink they ordered for me, no thanks, I don't drink.....and they were all dazed and confused......I think in the context of a bar, I apparently come off as a lushy harlot, which is at once disconcerting as well quite heartening. so lovely nina called at midnight and I had a bit of a chat with her and then amy called and my phone died, and then I finished the book and that was my night. I heard the intercom say CODE YELLOW OB at around 5 am, and part of me ( a lot of me) was going to ignore it, since my pager did not go off, and then this tiny, angelic voice inside of me was like, get up you disgusting wretch of a creature.....actually, the voice was loathsome and monstrous, but its purpose was angelic and it got me out of bed and into my white coat and running to the elevator and then we all assembled 5 am in the ER, surgeons and ob/gynes and all sorts of residents, waiting for a pregnant woman from an MVA (motor vehicle accident) and of course the ER was full of the sequelae of a society that sanctions drinking to excess on new years.....and it was scary.
all the drunkards out of control and all these bleeding people in that were rushed in from different MVAs and our ob/gyne team was trying to ascertain whether the pregnant woman in the passenger seat of the car that got hit on the passenger side by the drunakrd driving the SUV....whether that preganant woman who the ambulance was bringing was 23 weeks flat or 23 and 6 because they try to save the life of the fetus at 24 weeks (or super close) but not at 23....and of course, we did not have that info, and we are all holding our breaths until she is wheeled in, and thank goodness my white skinned red haired resident speaks kick ass spanish, thankfully, and there are 3 different bloody patients in this ER receiving area, and a man and a woman are calling out to each other as they are being ripped out of there clothes and stuck to monitors and there are all these x-rays going off and i didn't have a lead suit on (they have these smocky lead things you can slip on your arms) and I think, oh shitballs, my ovaries and I finally put one on, but it doesn't have the little addenda strap to cover your thyroid, and after leaving that room, I keep thinking my thyroid feels scratchy and painful from the irradiation and wouldn't that just be grand, the cells mutating in my thyroid as my little eggs lose all their viability....and the fetal heart tones are fine and we do a quickie ultrasound and turns out the baby is fine and the woman's face is suffused with relief when my resident explains to her in spanish that the baby is okay.
turns out we also have to tell her that her husband has been arrested for driving without a license.....undocumented immigrant husband driving his pregnant wife to the hospital because she felt pain in her chest, and she tells him to drive slow, be careful, and this suv driving drunk driver (the suv detail made the person especially evil, as if the drunk driver hitting a pregnant woman part was not enough) plummets into the car as they are at a stop sign, and now she is in the ER, only one person is speaking a language she understands, she doesn't know if the baby is hurt, the police has taken her husband......och, what a mess. (i use och like the dad in angela's ashes)
anyway, everything turned out okay, but it was a slice of craziness, like on an episode of ER or something.
so I am on ob/gyne now. I have see two vaginal deliveries and 2 c-sections. I must write more about those later. promise.
I came home at 9 am, on sunday, new years day, after being in the hospital all day saturday, because I was the chump who volunteered to be on call for new years eve because nobody else wanted to.
okay, i was really only supposed to post that rumi poem and call it a night. thanks for enticing me to write a bit.
ps--this is 2006. the year of my 10 year high school reunion. if that is not a kick in the ass reminder about how life flies by in the blink of an eye, lubricated or not, making a plip sound or not.....I don't know what is.
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