Cowgirl and Pumpkin

When we were in medical school, my friend Karen had this propensity for making up little songs. They were usually impromptu, funny, and endearing, although rarely Grammy material. There's one in particular that's stuck with me over the years. She made it up when she was on call one night, I think on surgery. I often find myself singing it in my head in the wee hours of my calls, and every now and then on nights like tonight, when I'm just freakin' tired. It goes like this:

I'm a tired cowgirl and I wanna go to bed
That's what the tired cowgirl said.

Simple. Succinct. Capable of being stuck in one's exhausted brain like a sing-song little mantra.

I am a very tired little cowgirl.

Pumpkin the Wonder Mutt over here just buried my cell phone in the blankets on the couch. I think that may be a subtle attempt at telling me that I need to stay home more. She's been getting very upset in the mornings when it starts becoming obvious that I'm not going to be staying home that day. I feel bad, but she deals with it okay. Soon enough, puppy, soon enough.

And in case you're wondering, yes, that's still Maggie I'm talking about. She has many nicknames. Her full name is actually Margaret Mae (and then we have the same last name), but she's also known as Maggie, Mags, Mutt, Muffin, Pooch, Spoochie, Baby, Pumpkin, Dog, Goofball, Nutbutter (which is an extension of "Nut"), Punkin Head Doggie, Crazy, Magpie, Skilimou (which means "my dog" in Greek), and Best Girl Ever, to name a few. My old roommate used to call her Magglio, after the White Sox player (knowing full well that Maggie is a Cubs fan). What's amazing is that, a, at this point she answers to any and all of them (as well as things like "Donde esta mi perro?"), and b, they're still better than her original name when I got her at the shelter, which was Sweet Pea. Which, she's so not a Sweet Pea. I mean, it still pops up occasionally as a term of endearment, but, as her actual name? No way. She never answered to it, and I refused to use it the first few days she was mine, which meant that she didn't actually have a name. And then about three days after I got her we were sitting on the back patio under the stairs that led to the second floor mother-in-law apartment, and we were playing and I looked at her and I said, "Your name is Margaret, isn't it?" And she licked my face, and so it was.

And it's quite possible that was the last time I called her by her given name that she wasn't in trouble for something or about to get into trouble for something.

Have I mentioned that I'm exhausted? I think he q4 thing is already getting to me, but I also was thinking in the car on the way home tonight that I've really been dealing with a lot of the more concrete manifestations of illness than I'm used to. Like, today Mike and I googled one of the patients we discharged home late last week (to hospice) and discovered that she'd died on Sunday. She was such a sweet little old woman, and oh my God, she was so miserable. She was in so much pain there at the end (she's the one, for those of you who've heard this story, who GI came in and did a somewhat urgent colonoscopy on her at midnight during my first call). And I as thinking about her on the way home and how horribly swollen her legs were, to the point that they were disfigured and the skin was all translucent and they looked almost unreal. And then I thought about how many times I've seen that in the past month. How many diseased and distorted variations I've seen on the physical human body this month. Not that I'm not sort of used to that, it's just so much more in your face, so much more concrete, than what I've become "used" to dealing with. Which, it strikes me, is a reason so many people don't like doing psychiatry, because it's so abstract and kind of existential and so rarely concrete. I think that's actually a little bit easier for me, a little more congruent with my way of thinking. I wonder what that says about me....

Well, whatever. Snugglepuppy and I are going to bed.