Intruders are not for fun, they are for learning and instruction.

The past 24 hours have been a cornucopia of both "liberry" goodness and real life drama. Far too much stuff for a single entry, so I'll just split it up as it happened.

Let's start with last night.

I went to bed around midnight and fell right asleep. Slept pretty hard too. Imagine my confusion when my sleep was disturbed at 1 a.m. by a sudden noise from elsewhere in the house. My sleeping mind registered it and began trying to wake me up, but it was having trouble. By the time I roused enough to know something was up, the noise itself had already passed, but I somehow knew it had occurred. Also troubling was the fact that my cat—the usual source of sudden noises in the night—was sleeping on my chest.

Before I could even calculate the ramifications of this realization, I heard a voice. It was a woman's voice, though I couldn't make out what she was saying. It sounded like it was coming from somewhere inside the house. Normally I would be alarmed to know I had an intruder, but my brain was still not quite awake enough to even register any emotion other than confusion. Was it the TV? No, I'd turned it off. I'd turned everything off. The image of some crazy woman wandering around in the basement popped into my mind, but I couldn't even work up any fear over it.

Then, I heard the voice again, this time more clearly. It said, "Hoo hoo."

"Hoo hoo," I said, responding to my wife. She had snuck home from her ER rotation and was creeping through the house quietly calling out our standard lovey-dovey greeting of "Hoo hoo" in an effort to prevent me from being startled awake and accidentally whacking her with the stout "brainin' stick" I keep under the bed. Good plan. She's a smart cookie.

Turns out, she'd had had a very bad evening in the ER.

At some point, one of her superiors on the floor had told her to go have a look at a dead fetus in a plastic bag. They said it was the sort of thing medical students should see. She didn't know how it had died, but she went and saw it and was unsettled by it. More unsettling than the fetus itself, though, was the way her superiors were so flippant about it. ER docs tend to build up some serious mental callouses when it comes to unsettling matters, like death. They see enough of it every day that they can't afford to come unglued about it no matter how affected they might otherwise be as a human being. She recognizes that and knows that it comes with the territory. We've both talked to plenty of docs who went into their careers thinking they were going to be the all-caring all-compassionate doctor who would never become jaded. Then about three months into their internship, they just realized that Shields Up was the only way not to go insane over the kinds of things they were seeing.

My wife is not a thin-skinned person. Last night, though, she wasn't prepared to be so calloused. It made her sad that here was this little fully-formed little baby lying in a plastic bag, reduced from the level of a formerly viable human being to that of a display item, a curiosity, something "medical students should see."

Knowing she was helpless to do anything else for the child, she instead shed a tear and said a prayer for it. (And this is every bit why I love her.)

Soon after that, she decided she needed to go home and sleep in her own bed with her own sweety. I was glad to have her home, though not for the circumstances that caused it. We snuggled up in our comfy bed and soon snoozed together.

She and I both knew that the ER rotation would not be an easy one and that she was going to see some disturbing things while on it. Sometimes those things can sneak up on you, though.

Sorry. I promise the rest of my entries will be far cheerier than this. And there's huge good news on the way...