Rachel’s Perspective
6:15 a.m. — My “alarm” goes off: Thomas (our 10-month-old) is awake! As I’m getting Thomas his breakfast I hear the rustling of footsteps down the hallway. Noah (our four-year-old) is awake and coming down the hall, looking for his bowl of Fruit Loops and Bluey on TV, which Dave has gotten ready for him before he left for work.
The boys and I have breakfast and play, and then I load them up and take them to daycare.
After drop off, I make a cup of coffee (with lots of vanilla creamer) and sit down to look at my upcoming meetings and projects for the day.
A typical day involves meetings with members of the residency leadership team (I get to collaborate with Allison on so many awesome things!), SEA or AAMC faculty development committee meetings, and work time on educational scholarship projects with other members of our department. Because of clinical schedules, most of my meetings fall in the morning and mid- to late-afternoons/evenings, so the middle of my day is spent working on presentations, manuscripts, catching up on emails, or keeping up with the latest med ed research.
Sometimes when I’m working in my office in the Northwest Tower, and the stars align, Dave and I can sneak a quick cup of coffee together in the anesthesia lounge or at Kaldi’s on campus. We’re in touch throughout the afternoon to decide who will pick up the kids based on our schedules.
Once everyone is home, we make dinner and spend time playing as a family, sometimes going for a walk to a nearby park.
Thomas goes to bed at 6:30 p.m. Noah follows around 8:00 p.m.
After that, Dave and I take a few minutes to review the calendar for the next day (Who is going to take Noah to swim lessons? What time will we both be home? What’s the plan for dinner?) and then Dave studies for his upcoming applied exam while I pack the kids’ bags for school the next day, tidy up the toys, and then settle in for a glorious hour or two of reality TV (currently catching up on the Amazing Race!)
David’s Perspective
My alarm goes off around 5:30 and I resist the temptation to hit the snooze button. I slip out of the house as quietly as I can to avoid waking everyone up and drive to work sipping on a room-temperature cup of coffee that was made the night before. Once parked in the garage, I put in my headphones and walk down the Link to my office.
As I’m sitting in my office, I look up my patients one last time, enter PACU orders, and head to the morning huddle. I take the trauma phone from the overnight attending, and head to preop to see my patients for the morning before heading to the control room to set up my “office” for the day.
My phone rings almost exactly at 7:27 a.m. It’s Clayton saying the patient in 209 is ready for induction. We successfully get this room started. About halfway through, Pete tried calling me to get me to come to 204 for induction there. From this moment on, my morning is a blur of evaluating traumas, arranging breaks and lunches, starting cases, finishing cases, a stray meeting about the anesthesiology elective for the medical school, and working on my next resident education presentation. If I’m lucky, I get to have coffee with Rachel, but today it has to be in the lounge because I’ve got the trauma phone.
At 2:00 p.m. I check in to the staffing meeting and watch Jen Mahan blast through the schedule ensuring that we have staffing and that people are getting out on time.
Before I know it, it’s 5:00 p.m. and we’ve got a plan for everything. The last few hours of my shift are spent handling traumas or emergent cases, trying to pare down the OR board to relieve the 10-hr CRNAs and residents, starting to put plans in place for the 12-hour CRNAs, and ensuring that the 13’s and Wit get dinner.
At 6:55 p.m. the PM trauma attending is here and I hand everything off. I walk back to the car and speed home to play with Noah before bedtime (Thomas is already snoozing away by the time I get there on trauma days).
Rachel and I talk about our days, check the calendars for the next day, and watch some TV before heading to bed and doing it all over again!
