Dr. and Mrs. Reamsnyder

It's been over a month since a rather momentous occasion... I successfully tricked Meg into marrying me. Married life hasn't changed me all too much, the day-to-day is very much the same. I have noticed that people treat you with much more legitimacy and respect when you're a married man, which is nice. I've already started thinking of myself as a "family man", even if my only child right now is a 70 pound rottweiler. Gotta take care of my own, ya know.

Just about everyone reading this would have been at the wedding, so I won't bother going too much into detail on that. It was beautiful and cute and sweet and the happiest day of my life. It was great to see everybody there, great to have the family so heavily involved, great to celebrate our relationship with all the important people in our lives. Thanks everybody for making it such a wonderful day.

The honeymoon afterward was amazing. We went to Sandals at Montego Bay in Jamaica, and it was a slice of paradise. Full service, beautiful weather, big long beach, totally clear water, delicious food, free booze, great activities, and pure relaxation. We both felt a thousand pounds lighter having all the wedding planning done and after everything went so perfectly, and it was nice just to be together without anything else bothering us. We got to reconnect and enjoy the beginning of our new life together, and I couldn't have been happier.

In less fun news, I've been really struggling with my pharmacy rotation this month. I'm with the oncology specialty pharmacists at the James cancer hospital at OSU. I didn't anticipate how emotionally draining it would be to interact with such sick and frail people every day.
I'm having a much harder time disconnecting from it than I have in other practice settings. It's especially difficult because every patient and family I meet reminds me of somebody I know, and I feel overwhelmed with much more empathy than I expected. Every single case is a damned tragedy and I can't stop thinking about the problems facing the patients and their families. One patient was a stage 4 (almost always terminal) widowed mother with 15 and 13-year-old daughters. Another patient was a dying 25-year-old guy with his 23-year-old, 8-months-pregnant wife... that one really sent me into a spin. I can't even imagine how I would handle it if I was dying and Meg was pregnant or we already had young kids... it's terrifying.
I can't get all the patients out of my head when I get home and I can't stop putting myself in their shoes. I've had countless nightmares since this month began where I or someone I love is being told they have metastatic cancer, or I'm watching them fade away from the disease.
This is all further made worse by the sinking realization that, given my family history, cancer is probably what will kill me and most of my immediate family, eventually. It's terrifying because I've seen enough young people dying from it to know that it can strike at a frighteningly young age. By no means am I saying that it's more convenient to die when you're elderly, but it terrifies me that it'll come too soon, when I still have a family depending on me.
Most of the patients seem more concerned about the people who depend on them, rather than being concerned about themselves. It's just constantly heartbreaking. It must take a special kind of person to work in this type of setting. With the limitations of what I can do in this rotation setting, I don't feel like I'm making any difference, so there's no fulfillment by making patients happier or more comfortable or more ready. I constantly feel helpless, feeling like I don't know enough, or we don't have the science these people need, feeling like even if we try our damnedest but we still are powerless against so much.

I used to think I wouldn't have a problem, and be able to separate myself and be fine when I got home from a work environment like that. I was wrong.