Last week Skylar told me he was going to have to start doing 28-hour shifts now, and I haven't check with a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that's illegal. I told him in this house we are law-abiding citizens so he could just go ahead and shut up about this 28-hour shift nonsense but he said he doesn't have any control over this or anything else in his life.

This man is 33. He outlived Jesus. I haven't read the Bible in a minute, but I'm pretty sure Provisions 25:16 says something about how you shouldn't still be working hours like this once you've outlived Jesus. I told him that, too, but he's a terrible Christian so it didn't matter.

When medical school began a decade or two ago, people kept telling me residency would be an absolute nightmare and I mostly ignored them because what was I supposed to do with that information? Stop him? This man can't be stopped. Believe me. I have scheduled family meetings to discuss his habit of standing completely naked in the bathroom with the door wide open and a direct shot through the windows to the neighbor's windows and by the end of the meeting we didn't even get to the nudity problem and I've somehow committed to doing a better job of cleaning up after shaving my face.

The last two years of medical school I sort of felt like I was living with a needy ghost who had to be fed three meals a day and whistled in the house whenever he passed through it. It was not fun, but I'm a strong, resilient, adorable man, so I handled it with dignity and grace and the occasional meltdown.

Then residency began last June, and that's when I discovered I had aged out of this. Somehow his schedule got worse. And, yes, we were no longer paying the gdp of a midsized country every four months in tuition, but they still somehow justify making him work literal 85-hour weeks and then they pay him $9 for it and slap his ass on the way out the door.

The worst of it came in December when they started making this man work 14-hour night shifts six days a week. He would start work at 6:00 PM and then get off around 8:00 AM. He'd come home and immediately go to bed in the basement while I spent the days acting like the family in A Quiet Place with our dogs upstairs. He'd get up around 4:00. I'd make dinner and he'd scarf it down, looking like a zombie, before heading back out the door for his next shift.

This went on for WEEKS.

I tried to make it fun for a minute by packing midnight snack bags with embarrassing or confusing messages written on them so the other doctors would gossip about and ostracize him when they saw it in the shared refrigerator.

But during week two he got very sick and I got very sick of being a war widow who wasn't even allowed to get back out and start dating hot bachelors again because my husband was technically still alive and costing me money.

I asked him, repeatedly, if he could call in sick at least once and try to get some rest and recover from a cough that was so loud NASA is now studying him, but he said they told him when residency began that you can't call in sick. "You're either in the hospital or you're in the hospital."

Again, I haven't checked with a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure everyone involved in this should be in prison. And not even one of the nice ones where you get your own cell.

What made the night shifts even worse is they covered all of the holidays. This man worked on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years.

But we survived it. And he went back to his 6:00 AM to 6:00 PM shifts every goddamn day, which still absolutely suck ass, but at least they aren't as bad. But those shifts only lasted for about a day and a half when he told me he had to start doing 28 hour shifts.

These begin at 6:00 AM and go until 10:00 AM or so the next day.

You need to believe me I almost marched myself to the hospital to talk to someone like an angry soccer mom who found out her kid got a B on an English paper.

Skylar says there's nothing I can do about this. That I have no control over our lives at the moment, either.

Even though I have also outlived Jesus.

~It Just Gets Stranger