At about ten o’clock, the ER filled with exhaust fumes from the ambulances parked outside the emergency entrance. Exhaust fumes! That was great for the asthmatics. They thought they had come in to get treatment for their asthma; they wound up leaving in worse shape than they’d been in when they first got there! And the place was scorching hot for several hours; it must have been in the mid-eighties in there. God knows why! I felt very rundown and I had no appetite. I ate nearly nothing the whole night. I didn’t want dinner. That whole child-abuse case was getting me down; it killed my appetite. But we finished at one, which isn’t bad, and I came back home and listened to the messages on my machine. I ate some food and I’m listening to this music now and suddenly I’m on vacation. Tomorrow I’ll be home! Strangely, I’m not that excited about it. I am excited about seeing Karen and my parents and everything, but I’m not excited about the idea of going home itself. It’s funny, I think it’s really starting to bother me that I’m going to be leaving the Bronx for good in a couple of months. I’m starting to feel that I’ve made some good friends here and I know I’ll have to leave them and I’m already getting sad about it, three and a half months ahead of time. Isn’t that terrible?
Amy
MARCH 1986
Wednesday, February 26, 1986
It’s the last night of my last vacation of internship. Tomorrow I start on 6A [at West Bronx]. I haven’t worked there before, but I’ve heard it’s a real killer. And of course I’m on tomorrow night. So I’ve gotten myself really depressed.
These past two weeks have been very special to me, very relaxing and calming and restful. This was the first time I’ve been able to be a full-time mother, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, without interference. Since I started my internship, Larry and I have never been alone with Sarah for such a long stretch of time. There’s always been someone else around. This was my first opportunity to get to know my daughter. I did everything for her: I changed her diapers and fed her her meals, I got to talk to her and to watch her go through her normal activities without any interruptions. And I actually managed to watch her take her first step! It happened about a week ago, while we were in Florida. She’s been cruising for a while now [cruising: walking while holding on to a surface, usually a bed or a table], but one morning last week she just let go and took three steps without holding on. It was great.
So I really got the chance to know what being a mother is about during this vacation. And I liked it. I liked it a lot. It sure is better than working in all these damned hospitals where nobody cares about anything except themselves. I really don’t want to go back. I just don’t want to go back to work tomorrow.
So what else can I say about the vacation? We stayed at a condominium in Fort Lauderdale. We went to the Miami Zoo, we went to the beach, we went out on day trips, we did a lot of things. I caught up on some sleep, and I had a lot of time to think about what’s happened over the past few months and especially about what happened at the beginning of February. The more I think about it, the angrier I get. I really was taken advantage of! There was no need for the chiefs to do what they did to me. They definitely could have let me go home and found somebody else to cover the ER that night. It wouldn’t have meant that much to them, but it sure meant a lot to me! I thought that going away, taking some time off, would make me ease up on this. But it didn’t. I can’t forgive them. And I can’t forget it.
Well, I’m going to put Sarah to sleep now and then I’m going to try to relax a little. I’m really very tense about tomorrow.
Saturday, March 1, 1986
So far, 6A hasn’t been as bad as I thought it would be. The census is low and it’s a good thing because the chief residents are trying to screw me again. It may actually work out in my favor this time. I’m sure they won’t be too happy about that!
What’s happening is, there are usually four interns working on 6A. It’s a big ward, there’s the capacity to house fifty patients, so when it’s busy, you really need to have four interns. But this month, we’re one person short. That’s because the fourth intern is supposed to be a psych rotator [psychiatry residents have to work for four months on either internal medicine wards or, if they’re interested in child psychiatry, on general pediatric wards during their internship year], and he’s not going to be showing up. The reason he’s not going to be showing up is that the people who run the psych program felt he was too “psychiatrically unstable” to do a rotation on a ward as stressful as 6A. So rather than having four people covering, we have only three people. It’s too stressful for the psych rotator when there would have been four, but nobody’s concerned about how stressful it’s going to be for us now that there are only three. That’s typical, typical! But I just might luck out because of the solution the chiefs have come up with.