Light At The End Of The Tunnel

Today was a day when our usually-harmless clinic policy of seeing same-day walk-ins backfired. There must have been at least nine add-ons, none of them straightforward. There was my post-operative patient who answered my usual introduction (“hi, thanks for your patience, sorry you had to wait, I’m going to wash my hands now, how are you doing?”) with “I can’t see anything” followed by “April fools!” NOT funny.

There was the lady in hospice with a ruptured globe who refused surgery. The patient with a bleed in her eye whom I neurotically examined and re-examined for an underlying retinal detachment; the patient who kept coming back with elevated eye pressures; the eyelid abscess that had to be redrained; the pink eye.

For some reason getting pink eye is a stigmatic thing for eye doctors, like getting “I don’t wash my hands enough and LOOK where it got me” branded on your forehead. Like a lawyer getting sued or a teacher failing an exam. It also puts you out of work for a minimum of two weeks, which means all the other residents hate you because they have to cover your call. But forget all that. I washed my hands about fifty times just thinking about giving E conjunctivitis.

I came home to her rolling on the floor and squawking like a bird and thought, maybe this work-mother thing isn’t so profound after all. It’s good to put in a solid day’s work, and it’s good to come home and be a mom. Work in moderation makes me a healthier person and thus a better mother. Clearly the operational word is “moderation,” particularly in this line of work, but I no longer feel like I’m playing a game I’ve already lost. There is hope.