Doctors' kids miss them, and the family builds its own fixes

A surgeon's kids FaceTime him from their iPads while he is in the operating room, and he cannot pick up. Alyssa Kressel, a strategic communications professional, has spent more than fifteen years alongside her husband's surgical training. This episode is based on her article "What the children of physicians carry," published on KevinMD. You will hear why the usual advice about adjusting hours does not fit a transplant schedule, and why she puts the weight on the time he is home. She talks about the doctors' wives and surgeons' wives groups that offered solidarity when nobody had a fix, about the resentment she is still working through, and about the bracelets she braided from old scrubs that grew into a stuffed animal with a pocket for notes. She also says what she wishes his residency had offered the people waiting at home. If you are in a health care family, or you train the people in one, this conversation names what the kids carry and what one family built to help them hold it.

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