Fourth or fifth day hurts badly (8)

You know when they show someone on TV washing their hair under a waterfall?
That's fuckin' bullshit, man, cuz that thing would knock you on your ass.
-- Mitch Hedberg
I contemplated editing the profanity out of Mitch's wisdom, but my compulsion to the fidelity of the quote beat out my aversion to posting offensive language. I'm sure you can handle it. There was no better quote.

At Great Wolf Lodge, there is a 48-foot tall water tower bucket that dumps 1,000 gallons of water every few minutes. Brave and foolish people can stand underneath the water as it pours over. I contemplated lying on the ground, face up, Jackass-style, so it could hit me and I could see how bad it was, but I decided not to for two reasons. First, because it's hard to know when exactly it's going to pour, and I'd look like an idiot lying on the ground (and the lifeguards may come and make me get up, either because they thought it unsafe or that I might be unconscious). Secondly, standing underneath the water and looking up was too painful in the face already, ie I chickened out.

Increasingly, Thursday mornings have been feeling like standing underneath that bucket, waiting for it to dump. On Thursdays at Queen's, I am the "on-call" doctor, so I am the go-to-guy for every visit that the nurses feel cannot wait for our increasingly distant future booking times (currently we are booking into mid March). Because they are compassionate people, the nurses will put people in to see me sometimes for problems that have been longstanding, just because it's nicer for patients not to have to wait. This is nicer for them, but not for me, and as a result I tend to see over fifty people on a Thursday, arriving home frustrated and exhausted afterwards.

I used to like my on-call days, but am starting to feel worn down by them. Two of the doctors I covered for in Goderich one time told me that the secret to working as hard as we do and keeping it together is stacking the hard days at the beginning of the week and getting them overwith. They worked a 24 hour emergency shift on Monday, and had relativelty light days the rest of the week, and only for the morning on Friday. My night shift is at the beginning, following this design, but I am going to have to make the end of the week more manageable, if I want to keep it together. Fortunately, there are only ten more Thursdays I work until the students break for summer, and I think I'll switch my schedule up a bit for the summer so I can windsurf, dive, and maybe even be around when the baby arrives.