"On Call"

It’s 11:30 at night, and there really isn’t any good reason to be up anymore. It’s not especially late yet, but I’m sitting at the computer, the blog updated with the latest photos of the kids, my e-mail checked (and re-checked, just in case someone wrote me while I’ve been sitting here tonight), my blog feed subscriptions updated (yes, I have all of my friends’ and families’ blogs e-mailed to me, so I don’t have to go look at them all the time to see if they’ve posted anything new or not), and I have even checked on eBay and think I may have found the perfect Halloween costume for Kolby – yes, for October. My problem: Michael is on call at the hospital. [For those of you who have not lived through medical school, internship, residency, etc., “on call” is a deceptive term. No, it does not mean, like it sounds, that the intern is at home, enjoying time with his family and waiting to be paged and rush into the hospital if needed. No, “on call” means that the intern is in the hospital, waiting to be paged for the next possible surgery case, at and time, day or night.] It’s really not been that bad of a month – surgery has been a nice enough schedule, although Michael is more tired from having to get up early in the morning, but most nights have not been late. Except he’s on call (overnight) every few days. Which isn’t all that terrible, either, really. I just can’t go to bed at a normal time when Michael’s not home at night. I mean, I can, but what for? With the kids all in bed hours ago (counting my blessings), there’s no one waiting for me to say prayers, no one wanting me to go lay down with them for the night (well, technically Kolby is waiting in my bed – this is the second time Michael has been on call and I have let Kolby sleep with me for the night). Kolby got really sad earlier when Michael wasn’t home to say goodnight, and after a long explanation of what “on call” means, how the doctors have to take turns staying overnight at the hospital to help the sick people, that the doctors don’t have to wait in line to take these turns, what surgery is {note to self: an explanation that doctors cut into people, fix them up, and then sew them back up is probably not the best idea for a 4-year-old, even if you try to make it sound less scary by saying that the doctors are helping, and this only happens to people who are really, really, really, really sick or hurt. Oops, I guess you learn as you go, as with everything in parenting}, and that doctors who perform surgeries use special tools from the hospital and not the tools that Grandma keeps in the garage for gardening; I was able to get Kolby to go to bed by telling him he could sleep in my bed tonight. Why not? Anyways, it’s now 11:48, and I am starting to get that faint sick feeling that I used to get when I would pull all-nighters to finish procrastinated homework assignments in high school (it’s really not all that late yet – what happened to those days when we were dating and it was an early night if we got in by midnight or 1am?) Anyways, good night.