Grown-up

Today I wanted to cry at work. There was no one moment that made me feel that way. No time where it was close to happening. It just felt that way. Maybe it was my upper lip, next to the left side of my nose. It kept twitching, and made me feel awkward talking to people.

It’s the lip quiver I also get just before I do cry, when I suddenly can’t control the words coming out of my mouth. It’s the tremble I saw in my own dad’s face last weekend as we left my hometown.  We were eating burritos at Taco Time. “I just realized this morning how much I miss you guys,” he said. There were tears in his eyes. And I don’t know but this might have been the first time I’ve really seen him cry. I think he has before and I always looked away, trying to be polite. But I looked at him and I didn’t fall apart. I miss him, too. But I have my own little pieces of my heart running around and filling every waking moment. When I think about them one day having their own lives and leaving my home to visit only a few times a year, well, then I can understand.

Work sucked today. Let’s be honest, it’s not been as much of a picnic the whole last month. We started with our Electronic Medical Adventure about 5 weeks ago. Since then I’ve been overbooking my schedule to see everyone, at the same time helping everyone else learn to use it and building templates into the system so that one day we may stand a chance in hell of getting back up to previous productivity levels.

I hate it. I don’t use that word very often. I hate this.

I don’t even like computers. I want to be outside, playing in the creek. Other providers have complaints and concerns and I feel like I need to be supportive of the system and the administration, but I don’t know why. This medical record system sucks. I told them it did before we even chose this one.  All transitions are painful, but the pain might never leave us with this system.  And now I’m a Super User. Somehow it’s made me feel like I need to act like a grown-up, not gripe, stay late, be a team player, be patient, be energetic.

Patient A complains no one called her back when she was suicidal.  So I say “Boy, I’m sure sorry about that. I never got no darned message about you wanting to kill yourself. I’ll put in a word with the triage nurses.”

Patient B’s blood pressure is 160/80, previously well-controlled. “My pharmacy said you denied the prescription refill, so I never got the med.”  So I say “Oh, durr. Silly computers. Of course I want you to take that medication!”

Patients with real illnesses are sent home without being seen by a provider. Others are sent to the hospital for not feeling their baby move before 20 weeks. Which is normal in humans. No one can find any paper charts, but nothing is populated into my electronic chart.

I’m fucking sick of it and I’m terrified that at any moment something catastrophic could happen.  Everything is entirely out of control.

But instead of saying so, I act like a grown-up.

Here’s the thing, though. I’ve been acting like a grown-up for the last 5 weeks. And feeling more or less like a functional adult, instead of a 12-year-old on Career Day. And it’s entirely overrated.

The more grown-up I am, the less human I am, I think.

I want to cry, for the pain of my patients, for how out of control this raging machine is. Instead, my lip just quivers as I smile and offer empty apologies.

I want to cry, for every night I stay away from my children because of internet connection delays, or making calls to return to disgruntled patients, after everyone else has left the building.

Instead I’m a grown-up now, watching my dad cry for all these reasons in a career only 24 years longer than mine.