So what did people in your parents’ positions do before cell phones? Just hang around the house all weekend in arm’s reach of a phone? Could they even go grocery shopping?
Yes, I understand. My family was always one of the last families to get the latest technology in almost everything - microwave, computers, cable (I was one of the few of the "MTV generation who actually didn’t grow up with MTV thank goodness). Although I was finally forced to get a cell phone when I moved to Maine for a year and was always driving far distances where there was hardly any civilization. My parents were afraid of my car breaking down, especially after my car broke down outside of Philly on a major highway in the dead of winter around 11:30 at night and I had to trek for an hour to find a place where someone would trust me enough to call the police for me. Not fun, especially as a young woman. We always laugh and ask ourselves how we survived without these modern appliances or gadgets. Yes, we can survive without some of them, but it’s not to say that some of these gadgets do make life a little easier.
To answer you questions in my normally verbose nature, (sorry can’t help it - I’ve always been too verbose when writing. Must be all the 18th and 19th century novels I read and studied. Ha!) my father graduated from medical school in the late 70s and started residency right after. When he was on call as a resident, he was basically at the hospital all day and all night with maybe a few hours of sleep, if that. There are many stories from him and his colleagues where they might have gotten about a half hour’s worth of sleep while being a resident. They stayed awake and alert on adrenalin and the drive to make save people’s lives in the emergency rooms. He was actually on-call the weekend I was born and luckily it was at the same hospital where he was doing his residency and could come for my birth since they had another resident there. This was prior to cell phones. Residents still have to do that. But even after he started his practice he basically had an answering service who would call him if there was an emergency. And, yes, even when he’d come home from the hospital on the weekends he was on call, he’d stayed home. When he was at the hospital on Sunday mornings, they had mass there since it was a Catholic hospital, so they could page doctors over the intercom or at least send someone to get the doctor. And back then, when he was on call, he was at the hospital in the morning and afternoons and be home by around 6:00, so we’d go to mass at our parish without him while he’d attend mass at the hospital. During the week he was at the hospital and his office from 7:30 a.m. to 10:30 or 11:30 p.m. He’d come home almost every night around midnight. BTW - My mother did the grocery shopping.
Nurses aren’t on call like doctors are. My father no longer has to go to the hospital on the weekends, and has cut his 16 hour days to 12 hours days. He’s “old”. Ha! Ha! Although he is still on call, but can now use the pager and cell phone.
I can’t say what doctors did prior to phones or answering services since I wasn’t around back then, but I suppose if a person couldn’t find the doctor to come to the house or to the hospital, I guess the sick individual was out of luck or would just pray that that he or she would get better. It’s not a sin for a doctor to have a pager or a cell phone especially if they care enough about their patients to want to be available at a moment’s notice so that a patient won’t die. Although people do misuse their cell phones, it doesn’t mean it hasn’t helped make things a little easier, especially in terms of contacting people quickly for emergencies. With the exclusion of the minor or major annoyances of cell phones going off when not wanted, they can be help in certain circumstances.
