Two women seeking equality in a state where some couples are more equal than others.

Sunday, July 26, 2015

Med Wife Life: Reflections on my First Year Married to a Physician

Rebecca started residency a little more than a year ago. I hadn't really thought about that until I was catching up with a friend I haven't seen in a while and mentioned it.

As a family med intern, Rebecca has worked some truly terrible shifts. We've gone days living in the same apartment without seeing each other, missing each other in some cases by just a few minutes. She comes home exhausted, with stories that are sometimes uplifting and sometimes heartbreaking.

And yet, I'm not sure I've ever seen her so energized (except for the enervation of the paperwork and structural problems with residency and healthcare administration) - meeting with patients, supporting them, and helping solve problems have been incredibly fulfilling for her. I'm proud of her hard work, especially in the small things, like when she gets home late because she sat for two hours past her shift end with a family that had just put their loved one into hospice, or when she is beyond outraged that no one had already alerted adult protective services on behalf of a vulnerable elderly patient.

That's not to say it's been easy for me or for us. I've been working full time at a job I love, but that requires strange hours, lots of driving, and a lot of changing shifts. Financially, we could probably arrange for me not to work somehow, but it would be difficult, and since I love my job, I'm going to keep at it. Sitting at home by myself doesn't suit me well anyway. But it does mean that a lot of housework doesn't get done. We have tried a variety of things, but in the end, I've mostly decided that there are more important things in life than a clean house.

The more difficult part than getting everything done is the loneliness, sometimes. It helps that I work so much, and that I've been good, mostly, about setting up social visits and going to church. Sometimes, even though we're both exhausted, Rebecca and I will lie in bed discussing ideas, dreams, policy, reading we've been doing. She's brilliant and well-read and has amazing thoughts that will improve healthcare, and maybe one of the hardest things of all this is to see her currently powerless in a large hospital structure and to realize that we have a while longer before either of us will start effecting the kind of change we hope to. But these conversations, even when exhausted, even tucked between shifts, murmured softly, sustain us.

The mantra "it gets better" has been around a lot. I'm not really buying it. It's gotten different, on some rotations, but I still worry when she is late coming home that she has fallen asleep while driving, as other residents have admitted to, or that she was attacked by a patient, which has also happened to other residents, or that she's going to get bronchitis again from lack of sleep and exposure to so many germs (as has happened to her already, more than once), or if this one heartbreaking day will be the straw that broke the camel's back.

It gets different, and at some point, residency will get over. It can't get better while attendings and administrators continue to assert that it has always been this way (it hasn't) and that there is nothing to be done (there is), or while family med is viewed as it currently is.

BUT: It will be done, and she will have control over her schedule and patient load someday. She'll be able to call people out, when she moves up in academic medicine, for the hypocrisy of asking residents to complete impossible amounts of work and then stay within their duty hours. Maybe I will try grad school again, or relocate for a dream job, or something else that I haven't even thought of yet. I'm not putting my life on hold - I'm doing what I can now and thinking hard about later. I'm keeping my identity and dealing the way that works for me, whether or not that's "appropriate" for a doctor's wife.

Here's to sixty more years married to a physician and sixty years of being a thorn in the side to the establishment.

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