If I had a Sun­day morn­ing off while I was a surgery res­i­dent, it felt like Christ­mas and my birth­day every time. They did not come often. I worked over 100 hours/week and was on call either every third or every other night. The year I stopped being a res­i­dent, laws were passed lim­it­ing res­i­dent work hours and that is a good thing. I do how­ever, have whin­ing rights so that when a younger sur­geon com­plains, I can tell them I walked to the hos­pi­tal and back uphill both ways and with­out shoes, etc.

Any­way, Sun­day morn­ings. In my mem­ory, the day started with dif­fused light through kitchen cur­tains, hot cof­fee in the press and an end­less day ahead of us. The smell of the cof­fee, of course, bet­ter than the cof­fee can ever be and then the smell of the grinds going down the sink when the press is spent. Really, this post is about that. My mem­ory of those spent cof­fee grounds just before they swill down the sink — not burned but cooked, for sure and done. The acid in them is revealed and they have given up all their fla­vor. Today, I smelled that again. I hardly drank any of the cup I poured. I mostly just lin­gered in the aroma of the cup and the spent shells of the beans that fired.

On those rare Sun­days off I would almost never be off at the same time as my wife who was also a res­i­dent, but in pedi­atrics. Her sched­ule was usu­ally every fourth night which was in oppo­si­tion to my usual every third night. If we landed on a Sun­day morn­ing together, it was truly spe­cial. I am a per­son who likes my alone time but when the day together with my part­ner hap­pens only once a quar­ter, I am in for that. It was usu­ally about sleep­ing as long as humanly pos­si­ble because one of us had been up the night before or both had. In any case, sleep, top priority.

We would live the two hours of morn­ing before noon as if they were an eter­nity. Eggs and b. and the cof­fee and an Eng­lish muf­fin. I would like to say we hiked across the plains or climbed a new route, but mostly the morn­ing lin­gered in to the after­noon and two young, exhausted doc­tors made their way even­tu­ally to the store for din­ner and a video (!) or we hung out a book­store or we tried to find the energy to talk about the future…we weren’t good enough at that and even­tu­ally the present tense of fatigue and my own lack of wake­ful­ness led to the end of our mar­riage. Many res­i­dents crashed on the rocks of res­i­dency. It really felt like a climb that sim­ply could not and would not end. I was in it for seven years. I worked unques­tion­ingly for any length of time that any per­son on the lad­der above me said to work and some­times there were four or five peo­ple above me on that ladder.

The end result of that work is that I know when a per­son is “sick” as in really ill. I know when I need to get my ass out of bed and go to the hos­pi­tal and when I can wait a few hours and store up rest. I can’ know that unless I have been through the fire of hav­ing seen it all, easy and hard, for seven years.

So this morn­ing the cof­fee roasted and as I poured the spent grinds, I smelled the past, was grate­ful for my young self that learned those hard lessons; and I won­dered about what other route I might have taken up this climb, my life.