If you are a doctor's wife, you know exactly what I mean! Call, and all that comes with it, the pager...and the beeping. Mike's call has been pretty decent this year, so I really don't have any complaints. But there have been months (and I know that for some of you, there is never a break!) when his pager goes off a lot! (And can you beat being woken up in the middle of the night by your husband's pager going off, and your husband is out of state? Because the nurse failed to check the call schedule and see that your husband wasn't even on the schedule, much less on call for the entire month?) And even before your husband's pager ever goes off, there is the whole 20 minute rule. (most Dr's live within 20 minutes of the hospital, so they are able to take some call from home)
Call can be so tricky, it is a double edged sword- you don't necessarily want to count your husband completely out of your plans, but you also don't want to end up feeling disappointed when the pager goes off and your hubby has to head out. So how do you deal with call? During Mike's intern year, when call was much more unpredictable, we just took it month to month, some times we knew the likelihood of being paged was pretty slim, while other days it was simply a matter of time before he was paged. Now Mike's call is fairly predictable and generally we feel okay making plans (in town of course!) Mike was on call during Christmas last year, and after a mini rush on Christmas Eve, his pager was happily silent. We look at call as part of the job, and luckily for us, it hasn't been too intrusive on Mike's time at home. But for those of you who constantly hear the beep, how do you handle the unpredictability of call? And does anyone have a funny about the pager going off at an inopportune time?
You had me at a month with no call and being within 20 minutes of the hospital. :) Kyle has to stay at the hospital when he is on call so I don't hear it a lot at home. I would rather hear it at home and have him around though.
Does Mike alternate Thanksgiving and Christmas every year? We are off Christmas this time around! Yay!
Posted by: Trisha | October 26, 2009 at 08:23 AM
Matt, too, takes call at the hospital. However, he does still get paged when one of his ladies goes into labor.
The beeps that drive me INSANE are the "page alls." Some goof nut pages everyone in the residency to tell them about some party they are having this weekend or report for PT exercise at 4pm.
Posted by: Dion | October 26, 2009 at 08:37 AM
Call isn't as bad now as it was during training, but I still hold to the mantra "hope for the best and expect the worst." If we have plans while he's on-call, we usually take two cars so that if he is called in, I can continue doing whatever we were doing. During training when he had a pager (he now just has his cell phone), I made him clip his pager onto his boxer shorts at night and put it on vibrate because "you are on-call. I am not on-call." It always takes me a long time to go back to sleep if I'm awakened in the middle of the night (reason #547 that I'm not a doctor!).
The worst middle-of-the-night call story I have is a mom who called with a case of emergency pink eye at 3 a.m. Yeah, I wasn't too happy about that - neither was he!
It's all part of our life together that we've just gotten used to, and again, thankfully it's not nearly as bad as it used to be!
Posted by: Jennifer | October 26, 2009 at 08:29 PM
My husband takes call at the hospital, too... so we don't get many pages. Although there are those pages that come once he's home, and trying to sleep.
The one time he was on pager call (here at home), he got a page in the middle of the night. It was his first page ever and I think he was a bit nervous. So neither of us got back to sleep for hours afterward.
Posted by: Mrs. D | October 27, 2009 at 09:09 AM