I had a pretty rough call the other night. Pretty much an all-nighter with a major trauma I got to do the anesthesia for. They are exciting and very intense and very long cases. Being "Post-call" means I worked from 7am on one day until 7am the next day. When I get off I'm what is referred to as "post-call". It's usually a pretty rough day from a being tired standpoint. Usually Sally insists I go to bed immediately because I'm otherwise incoherent and a very poor listener on those days. She is usually pretty burned out herself, too, but I tend to make things worse if I don't sleep a bit. Sounds logical, I know, that I should go sleep after being up and working for pretty much 24hrs straight, but it is still a hard decision when I haven't seen or played with the kids at all. When I walk in they typically scream, "Daddy!!" and make me feel like a million bucks. That makes it hard to then ditch them for the bed. That's my struggle for one more year of residency, and then things will be MUCH better. Thank goodness! :)
Having said all that, last Saturday I was post-call, and it was time for some family time. We ditched my morning nap and took off to the zoo. It was a BEAUTIFUL Texas day. A bit cool, sunshiny, breezy...the animals were out, especially the monkeys. They were swinging everywhere. Our zoo just got a family of otters, too, so that was pretty cool to see them swimming, fighting with each other, and just slinking around.
If you look closely you'll notice one carrot left in her baggy along with some monkey cages in the background. That's where we headed next and where Ella noticed that the monkeys were also eating carrots for lunch. At that point (and before I could stop her) she decided to share. That girl has an arm! She chucked the carrot to the monkeys who snagged it before I could. We kind of guessed that it would be okay despite all the signs saying not to feed the animals. Oops. What do you do? Ella was really proud of herself, so we just left it at that. Hopefully she doesn't make it a habit! :)
We didn't stay long, but it was great to be together post-call. Sally just taught a lesson to the young women at Church about being happy in the moment and not always waiting to be happy someday in the future. This was one of those days. My schedule is a bit crazy right now at times, but we've learned over the past 3 years that we can still make things work and make a lot of great memories despite the craziness of residency. We still look forward to me finishing my training and moving on to new adventures!
