Next week I start my last month on 6A. My last month! My God! You know, this is going to sound tacky and very clichéd, but the year really has gone by fast. Two hundred ripped-off nights!
The chief residents’ beeper party was today, and I missed it. I’d been looking forward to it for months. I even went out this morning and bought a blueberry pie to bring. Then I got stuck in the ER with a fifteen-year-old who got hit by a car and was dragged twenty yards. He was a mess; he had a basilar skull fracture, a hemotympanum [blood behind his tympanic membrane, a sign of skull fracture], blood in his urine, a laceration over the eye. I was fuckin’ stuck with him and I missed the party but I learned a little about handling multiple trauma. I wanted to go so badly, I really was pissed off. One of the highlights of the year, and I missed it. Too bad. There’ll be new chiefs the day after tomorrow. New chiefs: No more calling Jon, no more calling Claire, no more calling Arlene, no more calling Eric. I wanted to thank them, I wanted to thank them all, and now I don’t know if I’ll get the chance. I’ll miss them, and I’ll remember them. They were really great.
The tape’s running out. So I’ll stop now. One more month to go. One more month.
Amy
MAY 1986
Sunday, May 11, 1986
Sarah’s been taking a lot more of our time and attention lately. She wants to be read to constantly. She’s always toddling over to Larry or me, holding a book in her hand. She has two favorites: Goodnight Moon and Green Eggs and Ham. She can listen to them over and over again for hours. But they do start to get a little boring after the fifteenth or sixteenth reading.
It’s getting harder for me to keep up with Sarah because of how tired I’ve been feeling. My nausea’s just about all gone but I’m always so tired, all I want to do when I have a free minute is go to sleep. And Sarah isn’t very happy about that. She doesn’t like to see Mommy in bed. Lord knows, she sees so little of me, at least I ought to be able to play with her when I do manage to get home from work.
Things have been very stressful and aggravating for me lately. First, it was the month in the NICU. God, that was terrible. I never want to spend another night in there! As far as I’m concerned, neonatology is a complete waste!
And when I finally finished getting aggravated in the NICU, it was time to start fighting with the chief residents and the rest of the administration about maternity leave. I know this might sound like a very old story, but it looks like they’re trying to screw me again. Last week, they sent out these things called “Schedule Request Forms” for next year. We’re supposed to fill them in and make requests for when we’d like our vacation time. Since I’m already in my third month of pregnancy and some people have already started asking me whether I’m pregnant, I figured it was time to bring the issue up with the chiefs. So last Tuesday I went up to their office and had a little talk with them.
Jon and Arlene were sitting at their desks and I walked in and said, “Hi. Guess what? I’m three months pregnant. I’m due next November and I need to arrange maternity leave.” Just like that. You should have seen the looks on their faces. I thought Arlene was going to fall out of her chair. Of course, whether I’m pregnant or not doesn’t really make any difference to them; they’re not going to be here after June 1, so it isn’t their problem, it’s the new chiefs’ problem. But they certainly were stunned just the same. It took them about five minutes to recover enough to congratulate me. In some ways it was worth suffering through these weeks of nausea and exhaustion just to see the looks on their faces!
Anyway, what’s been done in the past is that a three-month period of maternity leave has been created by taking the one month of vacation and the one month of elective without night call we’re entitled to [residents have a one-month period called free elective; during this month, because they have no night call, they can travel to other cities to do electives] and adding another month of elective with night call. I told the chiefs that that’s what I wanted to arrange, but they immediately started giving me a hard time. They said that as far as they knew, all I could get was my one month of vacation. They were unwilling to give me the other two months; they told me three months off would cause enormous problems in the schedule, and they just couldn’t afford to do that. I’ve found out since then that three other women are pregnant and expecting at about the same time I am, and if they give us all two or three months off, it just might destroy the schedule.
Well, I don’t care if my having a baby does destroy their precious schedule. I’m finished worrying about everybody else. What it comes down to is they’re trying to discriminate against me and I’m not going just to sit back and stand for it this time! I’m tired of being pushed around and doing things just because the chief residents or the attendings or someone else tells me that that’s the way it’s got to be! So I made a call to the CIR [Committee of Interns and Residents, the house officers’ union ] office in Manhattan. I got the vice president on the phone and asked him exactly what the policy was for maternity leave. He told me that I’m entitled to six weeks of leave above and beyond any vacation or elective time I might have coming. That means that what I’m really entitled to is six weeks of maternity leave, four weeks of vacation, four weeks of elective without night call, and another four weeks of elective with night call. That’s a total of four and a half months, and you can be sure I’m going to take all of it! If they hadn’t tried to screw me over in the first place, I would have settled for three or maybe even two months. Now I’m going to take four and a half months, and if they don’t want to give it to me, I’m just going to file a grievance with the union !