Attaining Balance

Nobody in the three acute early afternoon appointments at the moment.  Gives me a chance to breathe.  I think the laptop on its docking station is about 2" too tall for ergonomic typing; there is a Bluetooth keyboard in its future.  After I get paid. 

I'm the only one who stays back here during the lunch break - it's quiet, no distractions.  A chance to sort of sit in my new office (blue and red walls!) and soak up the reality of what I am.  Alone, at lunchtime, with CCR humming off of the iPod and nobody asking my opinion on anything, I don't have to be sure of myself.  I don't have to tell anyone how they're supposed to do it...
Now you get to do it your way. I've heard that refrain a lot these days, at work. How do you want me to do it? And it turns out that despite doing things the way everyone else does it for the last four years, I do have preferences. And all of a sudden everyone wants to know how I want it done. I'm supposed to give orders - expected to, really. 
It's moving slowly.  I'm used to dictums coming down from above - and yet, for four years, I complained that I wanted it done my way - so now's my chance.  The locus of control has moved to me, and that takes some getting used to.

But at home, it's different - because I'm not the boss there.  Angel and I have run this marriage as an equal-share partnership since before we were married; each of us giving it everything.  And it works that way, because we are equal share partners.  The trick is to go from being the boss here - the doctor that I am and I'm expected to be, who's in charge, gives orders, tells people how it's going to be - to go from being that to being a wife.
I don't run the house.  Lord knows, if I did, some things would never get done.  But I have to do my part in running it - and finding that balance has been a difficult thing.  Faced with the constant encouragement to manage and my natural tendencies to try and run things, I've found myself becoming more and more of a hands-off dictator at home: lists, orders, and a whole lot of "why didn't you...?".  And that's not what's held us together for the last twelve years, and it's certainly not forming much cohesive glue these days.

Doctor, it hurts when I do this.  Well, then don't do that.

Open season on interpretations: Slipstream

I see you
child
in the electronic static
lost among
the clickety-clack of keys
and data

And I knew you once
then
before time grew short
and I could not see.

You were there.

Come out come whisper
child
we still can play if I
have not forgotten that,
too.

The static streams are loud
and you -
Did I only just
look away?

NsB 10-Aug-9

And it goes a little something like this...

Monday morning.  Eight-thirty AM.  Our protagonist enters her office, sets down her laptop on the docking station, and logs in.  Windows alerts: "Your credentials on this domain have changed.  You need to lock your computer and unlock it using your new password."  
I didn't change my password.
Our protagonist obeys the orders of Friend Computer, only to find that someone changed her password.  No possible combination of letters and numbers approximating the password she used to login that morning would allow access.
Nine AM.
Phone calls are made "in the back" and it is determined that in the process of setting up access to the scheduling software so that she can view her daily schedule, The Software People changed our protagonist's password.  To something ludicrously, dictionary-simply obvious.  And now, it seems, for whatever reason it can't be changed.  Every attempt meets the same error message: "your password does not meet the length, complexity, or use requirements of this domain."  This is the most everlovin' secure domain ever, except that our protagonist's password - the one that grants access to all the patient data?  It's on the top ten easily guessed passwords of all time list.  

The rest of the day went quite well, including the magic-appearing-patient trick.  You see, I'm supposed to have two patients an hour, giving me an average of 30 minutes an appointment, plenty of time to get settled with the EMR and all that, not to mention my nurse, who's even more new to the system than I am.  That would mean 10 patients a day, max.  I'm seeing 10 patients a day right now and I have at least six slots open still.  Started this morning with three slots full.  Ended with almost every spot after 10 AM occupied.  But I'm keeping up just fine, and walking out of the office by a quarter past five, which is the time I need to leave to get the Cups.  And I'm home by six every evening, and my Angel is making the most fabulous dinners.

And so far, it hasn't lost that surreal quality that makes me think that come the end of August we'll be packing up and heading back to the residency so I can take Q3 in-house OB call again.
So very strange.

Always something new...

From the Windows journal:
Today, I feel like an intern. Met D @ the hospital and agreed to see one of her new admits for her.  Should have been simple but my unfamiliarity with the hospital system made it a long morning indeed. An admit and discharge summary mote gave me experience in doing notes (we do them in SOAPware and print for charts, so the EMR has a copy of hospital visit notes for all patients every time.) And then I had to rely on D to print the whole thing out- my computer (A) didn't print correctly and (B) didn't have the printer driver installed-so it was exhausting for me to keep asking D what next - what to print - where to put the information (orders go under "medications", not "plan", despite there being no actual medications in the plan.
It's a strange thing.