I’ve spent the last two weeks in the crankiest of cranky moods, and I’m just now starting to surface.

For me, this week is the second of two weeks of evening float weeks in the pediatric emergency room; that means that I’m there from 5 PM to 2 AM every day. And that’s a pretty popular shift for the kiddos — they’ve been horsing around on the streets after school for a few hours and injure themselves, or their parents are just getting home from work to discover that they picked something up at school. It’s busy, it’s hard to even get a chance to breathe for those nine hours, and I generally get home all worked up about something or another.

In addition, I got roped into doing an hour-long journal club presentation yesterday, after the people who manage the club realized that they had screwed up by scheduling someone to give the presentation who would be on vacation. I had a little over a week’s notice about it, and it meant that I spent my weekend in Washington D.C. with my need to prepare for the talk looming over me.

Lastly, I found out last week that I was not chosen to be one of the two residents (out of 21) that will stay on an extra year to be chief resident of the program, and it’s been hard to hide my bitterness about it. It was something that I had convinced myself I really wanted to do — a year of teaching, managing the residents, and helping improve the program — and I can’t deny that I still think that I would have been a better choice than at least one of the two that are going to get that opportunity.

Happily, though, the weekend in D.C. actually did a lot of good for me, getting away for a bit and spending some very nice time with Shannon and her friends. And then last night, I got home from the ER to find that Shannon had bought me a few awesome presents yesterday; that went a good long way towards pulling me back from my funk, and today, I’m feeling a lot better.