THERE'S the Calm

This week I did only a little clinic. People I've been following are trickling slowly out past their once-weekly prenatal visits and into the lengthy span between 2 and 6 weeks, and then beyond. So I had a full-length day on Monday (after a birth on Sunday morning and another on Monday morning, both wonderful), left early on Tuesday and Thursday, and didn't go at all on Wednesday. This remains, as I happily catch my breath, the most demanding practice I've worked at. And I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, that time when everyone I'm following has given birth and is happily holding a healthy baby, and the four-times-a-week drive to and from Olympia is a distant and fuzzy memory; when the $500 per month I'm spending on gas and bridge tolls is happily tucked away into credit card bills, school loan payments, and non-essentials like rent and electric bills.

Here it comes...*sigh* oh happy distant day not behind the wheel!

I decided, since I had to do all that darned paperwork anyway, I was going to count my hours, contacts, and births in July even though I'd finished all my numbers. In going through those things, I discovered that although I took a long weekend off at the beginning of the month for health reasons and incidentally missed about 30 hours of work in one shot (not covered in the blog, don't wanna rehash it, thanks, I'm fine), I still averaged over 50 hours of clinic and intrapartum time per week. This not including the approximately 14 hours per week I spend on the road. Ouch. No wonder I'm feeling a little done. I've got some world class working-mama burnout that I've managed to only narrowly avoid all through my time with this practice. The numbers are illuminating, here in a month without a particularly heavy client load, where my only excuse is NOT spending several days of the month in or around Seattle for school-related things.

Speaking of which, I faxed off a veritable mountain of paperwork yesterday, and got a nice little "she's clear for her exit interview" kind of email from my clinical coordinator.

Until I stand over someone faxing my transcripts and certificates of graduation to the Department of Health, I am not going to be at ease about this. Even then, I'm not going to be *happy* about it. I'm not taking it personally, as so many students seem to have. What I do know is that there is one person at that school that is screwing over a lot of students, and it is NOT OK. She is not following the rules in letter OR in spirit, and is treating students like recalcitrant children instead of full-grown adults who hold lives in their hands on a near-daily basis, and have jumped through some SERIOUS hoops to get where they are. Deciding suddenly that we've done ANYTHING on a whim or are trying to get away with ANYTHING, with the amount of work we've done, is not just insulting but wrongs us as people.

Complaining on the eve of a merger with another institution, when things will change dramatically, is to a certain extent pointless. Nevertheless, there will be at least a little bit of (wordy) bitching coming off my desk headed towards Bastyr, the school board, MEAC, and NARM.

As good a student as I am, I never thought this was how my last interactions with the school would shape up.