Last week was a rough one. Tuesday morning, it felt like half of the patients that I saw passed away by the end of the day. Wednesday, I had to take a patient back to surgery from the week prior. Thursday afternoon, an appliance delivery went off script. Thursday night, a deer that I didn’t see ran about 5 feet in front of the dogs and me while I was taking them out before bed. They lunged forward, dragged me down my back hill until I couldn’t hold their leashes any longer without getting injured and ran off after said deer. We expected that our air conditioning (that we’ve been trying to have fixed since March) was supposed to really and truly be ready to go, but it’s only about half to two-thirds of the way there still. Also Friday, the dog from Wednesday was supposedly having further complications, but never showed up when I said that he needed to bring the dog right over to be assessed. Justin was also traveling for work from Thursday morning until Saturday morning, so he got to hear about all of these situations at home but was unable to do anything about them from afar. As our groomer at work said, “One of those things alone, fine, but all of them gets to be too much.”
Needless to say, I was more than ready to leave work on Friday afternoon. I’ve tried to not think about last week, especially the work parts of it since leaving there, and I did an OK job of it until today because tomorrow is back at it. I’ll (maybe) find out what happened with the surgery patient tomorrow. Even if I don’t hear any update tomorrow, I have pending lab results for him, so I’ll have to reach out when those are available. I can only hope that the owner is more pleasant receiving those than he was talking to the staff on Friday afternoon. Truly, I hope the dog is doing well now. I never want surgeries or any treatment to fail or lead to further discomfort for my patients.
This case marks three very difficult post-op patients I’ve had since being at this job in October. I feel like that rate is so much higher than anything I have ever had before, and it’s weighing on me. I generally love surgery and wish I could do that every day over anything else. Each of these cases has been somewhat exceptional, so I know it’s not necessarily me, but that voice in the back of my head would have me believe that it is. These poor outcomes or slow resolutions make me question whether I am any good at what I do at all. It certainly does not add to any confidence about my transition to the medical director role next month.
I know that this will all pass. Everything will be resolved. This week will (hopefully) go more smoothly than last week. I’m neither looking for nor hoping for anything exceptionally good to happen; I just want a normal, baseline, every day, completely boring, keep on keepin’ on type of week.
In the interim, those silver linings from last week: Rook is a terrible wolf and quickly gave up his pursuit of the deer when he hit the raging creek (because there were severe storms +/- a tornado nearby just hours before my favorite idiots ran off) and came flying back into the yard through the bushes, running laps around me until he got his excess energy out before I even made it out of my yard. My sister happened to be sleeping over that night because she had no power or cell service at her house after said storms, so at least I was not out looking for Magic all alone. Magic was recovered in one piece completely exhausted and soaking wet, snuffling around the edge of the road two doors away within 10-15 minutes of taking off. Justin’s brother was kind enough to come down yesterday morning to help Justin remove our old washer and dryer and install the new ones, which are working great and 1000x better than the old ones. With any luck, the HVAC guy will be stopping by any time to install the new controller for the last part of our system, and all of our air conditioning will work for day of the heat dome. Last, whatever happens during the work week, I get to spend the weekend with a dear friend I haven’t seen in two years, which will be lovely.
“Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.” ~ Miguel de Cervantes
