20th Anniversary Countdown: Guest Post #17

In celebration of my blog's 20th anniversary, I'm having guest posters every week leading up to the big day. 

Suzanne! She's one of the longest readers of my blog and is a fabulous member of our blogging community. She's a fellow Midwesterner who blogs over at Life of a Doctor's Wife where she touches on all the important issues of the day including what to buy for gifts, how to get a great lemon cake (seriously, Suzanne's disappointment over that cake lives rent free in my head and sometimes I want to make her the perfect lemon cake, but I do not know how to), how hard it is to make phone calls,  and why do we have to make dinner EVERY SINGLE DAY.  She is the voice of our generation.

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Our brilliant and hilarious friend Engie has been blogging for twenty years. What an accomplishment. I have been reading Engie’s blog since – I think – around April of 2010. (That year is the earliest record I can find of her commenting on my blog, so I’m assuming we found each other simultaneously. ) 

There was a long stretch of years in the middle there when I could not comment on Engie’s blog. For some reason, I can only leave a comment if I am using Google Chrome on my computer. But I have been reading, all along, and have loved everything I’ve read, from posts about her pets to her breakdown of what wild assortment of veggies turned up in her CSA to all of her book reviews. (Engie and I have a very narrow band of overlap in the books we like, which I have found delightful both in its intersection and in its divergence.) No matter what she posts, she keeps it real. She is a treasure and so is her blog. 

When Engie asked if I wanted to write a guest post, I was, of course, honored. Then overwhelmed by ideas. Then overcome with writer’s block. How can I possibly write something worthy of such a milestone in the life of a blog I have loved for nearly a decade and a half?!

After considering and discarding many ideas, I decided to revisit the beginning of my own blogging life. I started blogging in 2009 as Life of a Doctor’s Wife. These days I feel like I’ve kind of outgrown that title, and it’s rare that I talk about anything specific to being married to a physician. But for those who are curious about what it’s like to marry into medicine, here are twenty reflections from our life together so far.

1. A Long Beginning: I met my husband when we were juniors in college. At that point, he was studying finance. It was only after we graduated that he decided to pursue medicine. While I was in grad school, he worked retail while taking the additional prerequisites he needed to apply to medical school. You know, organic chemistry, molecular biology. That kind of thing. Then he spent four years in medical school, three years in residency, and three years in a fellowship program before he started practicing in his specialty. WHEW. While he did earn a salary as a medical resident and as a fellow, I was the primary breadwinner in our family for ten years. I have tremendous awe and respect for those physicians who started their families earlier in their training, but when we decided we wanted to expand our family, we waited to do so until he was in the end of his fellowship – hoping that it would work out that our baby would be born during the “easiest” part of his training, and right before his salary increased. We were extremely lucky that it worked out the way it did. My husband was able to time his fellowship rotations so that he was basically “off” for the first few weeks of our daughter’s life, and then he was able to interview for jobs and find a practice to join while she was still very small. 

2. The Uncertainty Factor: One of the most difficult aspects of being married to a physician, in the early years at least, was that we had little to no control over where we might end up – three times (medical school, residency, and fellowship). For me, the residency and fellowship match processes were extremely anxiety-producing. I had zero control over where we ended up. My husband applied to multiple programs each time, all over the country. I remember him taking an interview in [Southern State That I Am Sure Is Very Lovely But Sounded Awful at the Time], and being wracked with apprehension over the possibility of matching there. (The residency program was excellent, which is why he applied in the first place.) And yet, I couldn’t really do anything about that feeling; I was just along for the ride! [Note from NGS: This is much like the academic job market. So stressful!]

For the residency match, I was extremely fortunate that I had a remote job. It turned out that I could no longer be an employee of my company when we moved to a new state, but I was able to negotiate an independent contractor role with the same company which kept our income stable and gave me some continuity during the move. Then, my husband matched into a fellowship program in the same city where he did his residency, which meant that for the first time we’d be living somewhere for longer than four consecutive years! After some time and distance from those life-disrupting events, I can be curious about what our lives would have been like had he matched in Vermont or Alabama or Washington. But I’m very glad it turned out the way it did. 

3. Questions: Pretty much as soon as people find out your spouse is a physician, the questions begin. It doesn’t seem to matter if we’re at a social event or a funeral, chatting with friends over dinner or encountering strangers at a baseball game, at one point or another someone will have a question for my husband. I am always amazed by how open people are with their private medical problems! I don’t know if it’s just that I’m more resistant to sharing personal information with strangers than most people (says the blogger of fifteen years), or that the “doctor” title conveys an instant level of trust, or that my husband just gives off an aura of kindness and willingness to listen, but people will tell him the most personal things you can imagine. I hope this doesn’t come across as derisive; in fact, I feel quite tenderly toward people who are steeped in so much pain or worry over their symptoms that they feel the need to share intimate details with my husband. He never minds; he always listens and gives whatever non-medical-advice suggestions he can.  

What I find most funny is when people ask ME for advice, simply after hearing my husband’s specialty! I have no medical expertise whatsoever!

4. Call: The worst part, for me, about being married to a doctor is call. I would hazard to say it’s one of my husband’s least favorite parts of his profession, too. We are very fortunate in my husband’s specialty. During regular weeks, his days are made up of a combination of procedures and office visits. He typically gets home around six or seven at night. Most of his weekends are off. He values work/life balance, and has built a career that supports this value. We are also fortunate that he has a pretty cushy call schedule. He takes call every six to seven weeks, for a week at a time. 

During a call week, he spends every day in the hospital, rounding on in-patients, performing in- and out-patient procedures, and taking consultations from other physicians in the hospital. The hospital where he takes call is extremely busy and he will often be there for thirteen hours or more. 

When he does get to come home, he’s still on call, so he fields phone calls from the hospital and occasionally must head back into the hospital to perform emergency procedures. 

The patients he sees in the hospital are, naturally, much sicker than the patients he sees in the office every day. The volume of patients plus the nature of their needs means he is extra worried and on edge during call weeks. His schedule is erratic and we don’t see him as often. He’s in the hospital both weekend days, and sometimes he goes to the hospital in the middle of the night. 

Call weeks were much more challenging when our daughter was small, because her needs were higher. But I am still not a fan of them, even now that she’s more independent! 

5. Personal Physician Access: Let’s balance out one of the worst parts of having a physician in the family with one of the best! It’s awesome, especially for a semi-hypochondriac like me, to have a doctor I can consult at any time. My kid has a rash? He’ll check it out. I have a weird clicking noise in my knee? My husband will listen to it and let me know if I need to call my own PCP. He is extremely calm about medical things, has no problem dealing with blood or discussing intestinal issues, and helps balance out my tendency to panic over the slightest medical blip. He does, however, remind me on the regular that such-and-such is not his specialty before he tells me that he doesn’t think XYZ is worth worrying about. [Note from NGS: We always call my FIL, a retired family doctor, to ask if we should go to the ER. It turns out that most of the time the answer is yes.]

6. Mail: We get SO MUCH physician-related mail. I am curious if other professions get quite so much mail targeted to them? I’m not inundated with editing and writing mailings, that’s for sure. A typical mail day has a medical journal or two, a postcard with some sort of job offering on it, and maybe an advertisement for pharmaceuticals related to his work. Most of it goes right in the recycling bin. (Although we do have fun looking at the recruiter postcards and trying to figure out where the job is located. Usually these postcards list the big benefits of the job, like starting salary, call schedule, population, maybe an enticing detail or two about the locale, but they never list the city.) [NGS: I have never received professional-related mail at my home address and my husband rarely gets anything outside of occasional postcards about deadlines for conferences.]

7. Quizzes: My husband does read the journals related to his specialty. Some of them include little quizzes which we sometimes do together. As I have already stated, I have zero medical expertise. But like any longtime fan of ER and House, I am happy to make wild guesses. Once in a while, I get one right!

8. Evidence Based Medicine: This probably falls under the umbrella of having personal physician access, but I love testing theories I hear from friends, other physicians, and, okay, yes, Instagram gurus, against my husband. He is always happy to research the latest supplement for me, or investigate whether a certain diet is really better for you than others, or explore the link between dairy consumption and skin problems. If I get worried about a panicky headline – say, the recent news that Lunchables have concerning levels of lead in them – I know he will look into the evidence and help me decide how to proceed.

9. Conference Travel: Pre-Covid, continuing education was the driver behind many vacations for our family. My husband has to do so many hours of continuing education to maintain his medical license, and attending medical conferences used to be a great way to get CME hours. His hospital system used to pay for him to attend these conferences, and sometimes they were in fun cities we’d never visited: Nashville, Las Vegas, Sacramento. I could buy my own plane ticket, accompany him, and stay in the fancy hotels where the conferences were held. (My father was also a physician, and his annual CME took place at a ski resort, so my family went on a ski vacation every year!) This was a nice perk, but it has mostly petered out since covid hit; my husband’s CME mainly takes place online or locally. (I wonder if the same is true for other hospital systems? Big medical conferences still take place, but we haven’t been to one in years.)

10. Second Fiddle: One of the unexpected negatives of my husband’s career is how bad it makes me feel about myself. This is a me problem, I am well aware. Yet I can’t help but feel like I make such a smaller contribution – to our family, to the world at large – than my husband does. Okay, this bullet is depressing me, so I’m going to move on. [Note from NGS: No offense meant towards your husband and I'm sure he's a swell guy, but he has not given me fabulous blogging content and huge laughs over the last fifteen years, friend. In my world, your contribution to the world is invaluable.]

11. Med Friends: I have always been so grateful when our social network has included other medical families. I’m guessing this is the same whether your partner is a university professor or a police officer or the president of a manufacturing company… it’s just nice to have other people in your life who know the precise challenges you face. I have SO MUCH to be thankful for, and I promise you I am aware of the privileges that come with having a physician spouse. Yet, as with everything, there are downsides, and it’s nice to have a circle of people who understand those, too. My husband and I met another couple right at the beginning of residency, and they became our close friends. I was so glad to have them – the husband and mine could commiserate about their rotations and discuss patient problems, and the wife and I could vent about long hours and sit together at the inevitable residency functions. 

12. Oh, the Stories: When you have medical friends, you hear medical stories. No one is violating HIPAA, but there is a lot of friendly competition over weirdest/most harrowing/most heroic patient encounter. 

13. Patients in the Real World: A lot of family friends see my husband, which I find both gratifying and perplexing. Again, this is clearly a Me Thing, but I think I would have a hard time going to a friend about an intimate medical need. It’s heartening to know that my husband’s reputation and personality make him the right choice for so many people, but it’s still a little jarring when I see someone at a social event and they say, “Oh, I just saw your husband in the office the other day!” I can think of only one friend I’ve ever had who I would want to talk to about private medical stuff. Again, maybe I’m just weird about that kind of thing? [Note from NGS: My FIL had his brother-in-law, my husband's uncle, as a patient. The brother-in-law/uncle had a serious heart condition that landed him in the hospital and ended up with serious surgery, but my FIL could not tell his wife because of HIPAA. There was an awkward moment where someone assumed my MIL knew something and my FIL just shrugged. He literally couldn't tell her!]

14. Dinner Table Conversation: Even before I was a physician’s spouse, back when I was a physician’s daughter, I grew accustomed to random encounters with medical topics. Growing up, we had a wall phone in the kitchen, and my dad would often get calls during dinner. “How far apart are the contractions?” and “how long has he been vomiting?” and a whole range of other topics punctuated our meals. Thank goodness for the advent of cell phones; my husband can take his mealtime calls into another room. But I still overhear all sorts of fun snippets about blood and stool and vomit. 

15. Seeing the Other Side:+ I enjoy having the dual perspective of patient and physician’s spouse, because I think it gives me insight into what it’s like on the side of things. For one thing, I will NEVER be late (if I can help it!) to a doctor’s appointment, because I know how badly that screws things up for the entire day. (Hot tip: If you end up waiting a long time for your appointment, it’s probably not your doctor’s fault.)  I also love to pass on tips I glean from my own doctors – how frustrating it is when a doctor dismisses a concern without explaining why it doesn’t concern them, how much I love when my doctor says “what other questions do you have for me” until I have no questions left, how important a kind and friendly office staff is – to my husband. 

16. Video Games: My husband loves to play video games in his spare time. And I cannot complain about this because playing video games can actually help with his surgical dexterity.

17. Doctors Avoiding Doctors: Are all physicians like this? My husband rarely ever goes to the doctor. Fortunately, he has pretty excellent health… but he should still see a doctor every now and again like the rest of us!  

18. Support System: The absolute most difficult thing about being married to a physician is that I am his support system for some pretty awful stuff. Some days he has patients who are so sick that he’s not sure they will survive the night. Some days he discovers life threatening diseases. I know there are other people whose partners deal with horrible things – police officers, EMTs, military personnel, social workers – and I know that it’s MUCH harder to be those people, facing heartbreak on the frontline. It’s still a challenge to know how to support my husband after he’s just notified someone that they have cancer. I try to listen and offer him comfort and space to process his feelings. I never know if it’s enough. 

19. Jealousy: One of the questions I get most often about being married to a physician is how I deal with feelings of jealousy. This question was more frequent back when he was in medical school, but I still have people curious about it today. I completely understand how jealousy could sneak into a relationship with a physician. The work is so consuming! The physician is interacting with nurses and physicians and patients all the time! And yet, I haven’t found jealousy to be an issue in our relationship. Sure, I miss him from time to time. Sure, sometimes I suffer periods of feeling resentful that I end up doing more [mundane home/parenting task] than he does. But it feels like a normal part of the ebbs and flows of life/relationships/moods than like a burning jealousy of the job. Since I grew up with a physician for a parent, I had a good idea of what I was getting into. And I think it helps that I’m an introvert and like to spend a lot of time alone. Also, as I mentioned earlier, my husband puts a lot of energy into work/life balance, so I never feel like he values The Job over our family.

20. Perception: The last thing I will say about being a doctor’s wife is that I have this constant feeling of disorientation that the cute, goofy 21-year-old I fell in love with is a medical professional. A person who strives to be a kind, knowledgeable, trustworthy champion of his patients’ well-being. A person who makes people feel better, who solves problems, who saves lives. 

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Does anyone else have a relative/partner whose job dominates their life in key ways?