What Do I Keep Pinned to the Strap? Beepers.

The second best thing about my current job is that I don't carry a pager. Yep, that's right. No pager. Even when i'm working I carry a phone but no pager. And when I leave? I hand off that phone and walk out the door. Remember when you were in med school and were handed that luscious inviting black rectangle of plastic? Oh, the possibilities were endless. I would actually feel deprived if I didn't get paged for an entire day. What, no one needed me?! I ignored the fact that I was still in classes and the only people who paged me were members of the 'back row posse' as we liked to call ourselves. Then came our clinical rotations and the pages were a little more frequent but no less exciting. A page usually meant there was something for us to do or see and in our world, that was big time. Upon entering residency, I was given a pager with a gold chain on it to provide an extra layer of security when attached to my body. I was too legit to quit. Nope, nothing was going to separate me from this baby. Pages in the middle of the night became the norm, signaling an admission, a tylenol order, or a 'critical lab value'. Eh, not so bad. As we moved further up in the ranks of residency, we wore pagers like boy scout badges. The more the better. If your scrubs kept slipping down and your silhouette was reminiscent of Stephen King's The Gunslinger, more power to ya. Turning in my pager that last day of residency, I felt I was saying goodbye to an old friend. So what happened?

I quickly became reunited with a pager when I started fellowship. When on service, we were on call night and day for a month at a time. My pager never left my hip or my nightstand. It came along with me to dinner, on dates and to the movies. It sat expectantly on the floor during hip hop dance class. It vibrated gracefully during yoga and lit up while on the treadmill. It did not care if I had just called an old friend or was on hold with the cable company when it sang it's little tune. My pager came with me on my first date with my husband and perched itself on my sweaty hip while I trained for the Chicago marathon. My pager invaded my dreams, my meals, my sanity. I heard my pager even when I wasn't on call. I heard it on the bus, on the radio, when a flock of birds flew by. Instinctively, my breath caught and I reached for my invisible holster. When I wasn't on call, I would bury my pager at the bottom of my bag, as if I didn't want its plastic green-glow eye to be able to see me enjoying my freedom lest it become jealous and call me back to the phone. It's been a year (tomorrow) since I carried a pager. Yet still, whenever I hear that piercing bleat my heart speeds up and I feel...hunted. Seconds later I realize it is not mine and I go back to work. I work all night alongside the nurses and patients who need me to be fully present. And when I get home, I recharge so I can do it all over again. I know I will carry a pager again someday and I will see it not as a necessary evil but simply as a necessity. Until then, I will make my peace with the past and know that I am important. Despite being pager-less.