2011 — The Year In Review

A whole day of 2011 has gone by.  So far 2011 has been very similar to 2010.  Shortly after midnight I went to sleep, after my daughter texted me a happy new year text.  I was awakened about 2 in the morning by the answering service, chastising me for not answering my pages.  I have occasionally slept through my pages, but when I checked my Droid, there had been no more pages since my daughter’s at 12:01 AM.  The answering service listed off 6 pages that they had sent out.  Apparently something was wrong with the paging system.  She sent out a test page.  It never reached me.  I went ahead and started calling back the pages.  The answering service called again: it seems that the other doctor on call for our group, Dr. A., also was not getting the pages.  I wondered if this was some kind of Y2K+11 problem, with the failure of the paging system the beginning of the end.  Surely civilization would collapse if the ability to send text messages was interrupted for any length of time!  Then, realizing that sirens were not going off around town, I concluded it was probably a more local problem.  Our group, Cardiovascular Associates, had been purchased by a large hospital system in town, Norton Health Care.  At the stroke of midnight, while on call, I had changed employers, and something had gone horribly wrong, causing the paging system to collapse.  After further careful bleary-eyed reflection, this too seemed fanciful.  Eventually I came to the conclusion that the reason for the failure of the paging system was that there was no reason for the failure of the paging system.  Just another random failure in the American Infrastructure!

So, the answering service called me directly instead of paging me all through the night, ensuring that my REM sleep cycle was interrupted as much as possible.  Today, the first day of the New Year, I trotted off to work, rounding on a lot of patients.  This afternoon and evening, the only time I am “off” during the long holiday weekend, I went to Whole Foods with wife and son, had some good food, spent a lot of money on good food (why does the natural stuff cost more than the genetically modified stuff?  It seems the opposite would be true).  I went to the Y with my son, worked out only 45 minutes because they closed at 7 PM, came home, checked my email, carefully avoided looking at my task list from work, got tired, and went back to bed early.  Had a tooth ache, woke up at midnight, took some aspirin, decided to have some herbal tea and toast, and … wrote this blog entry!

New Year’s resolution: Get more sleep! Happy New Year!