Everybody loves surprises, most of the time.
But I didn't care much for the surprise I got when I visited my wife in the town where she was working as a critical-care nurse. At least I didn't at first.
Anyway, here's my story, and you can decide for yourself whether I did the right thing or the wrong thing, whether you would have done as I did or done something else.
This all started about a year and a half ago when the hospital where Tracy was working at the time decided to kill the messenger.
Tracy is an RN, and a good one. Her specialty is critical care, and over the course of her 23 years as a nurse, she's done it all – ICU, CCU, ER – but she had spent the last 12 years there in ICU, on the night shift at the large regional hospital in the Southern town where we've made our home for years.
She loves her work, but this hospital is the poster child for a top-heavy, unresponsive bureaucracy. The administration is willfully ignorant of what is really needed for quality patient care, and its only real concern is its financial bottom line.
Nevertheless, for five years, the ICU had been run by a compassionate nurse manager who cared about the nurses under her guidance and who fought for everything she could to make their job easier.
However, she carried that a little too far when she honestly answered the hospital's annual questionnaire about ways to improve patient care. The administration didn't want to hear about the hospital's shortcomings, and her "negativity" compelled them to give the choice of quitting or being fired.
When Tracy's boss fell on her sword and quit, that was the last straw for Tracy. Having just made 20 years of service at that facility, she could retire with decent (not great) benefits, and that's what she did.
Tracy may have "retired" from the hospital, but at (then) age 46 she was in no way ready to quit nursing.
About four or five years earlier, during one of her frequent bouts of discontent with the workings of the hospital, Tracy had applied on-line with several travel nurse agencies. Over the years, they had kept in touch offering opportunities at a host of far-flung locations.
Now, I don't know what the situation is like in countries that have socialized health care, but the dirty little secret about health care in the United States is that there is a chronic shortage of qualified RNs, particularly in certain locations.
If a nurse is willing to relocate for three to six months at a time, hospitals are willing to pay them extremely well, with incredible incentives. Thus, a whole cottage industry has sprung up to put the supply of nurses in touch with the demand of hospitals who need them.
Tracy and I talked long and hard about what she wanted to do, where she wanted to go, and we decided that she should explore the traveling option, along with the option of taking a job in a city in our region.
At this point, I guess I should tell you a little about Tracy and myself. My name is Patrick – Pat for short – and I'm the same age as Tracy. I'm about as average as they come, not too tall or short, with brown hair now mostly gone silver, thick moustache, and while I could stand to lose a few pounds, I'm still in pretty good shape.
Tracy is a dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty with a trim little body that has held up remarkably well. She's still very slender with a healthy pair of breasts that are just slightly bigger than perfect for her frame.
We met when we were both in college, and the attraction was immediate and enduring. We were married right after I graduated, when we were both 22, which means we've been married now for 25 years. I've never wanted anyone else, and up until the events I'm about to relate, I didn't think Tracy ever did either.
We started our family pretty quickly, as soon as Tracy finished nursing school. We have a 23 year-old daughter who just finished college and is working in a city nearby. We have a 21 year-old daughter who tried college but was burned out on school, so she's working for an electronics retailer and doing well at it. And we have a son who is now 17 and about to start his senior year of high school.
Tracy looked at several job offers at hospitals in cities close to our town, and while they were good offers, the pay wasn't up to what she'd been making. I do decently in my job, but we've come to depend on a certain level of income, based on what she was making at the hospital.
And once she started getting offers from the travel agencies, it was pretty clear she was going to go that route.
She ended up seriously considering three: a hospital in suburban Los Angeles, a medical center in West Virginia and a regional hospital in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.
The overall financial package was a little bit better for the one in L.A., but Tracy finally decided she didn't think she could handle California traffic, and West Virginia was clearly behind the other two as far as the money, so she signed on to go to Idaho as an ICU nurse.
It was a generous package. For a six-month contract, Tracy got a $7,000 signing bonus, a base salary of $43.50 an hour, plus $4 an hour shift differential for nights, a per diem for housing that added up to $500 a month and she was guaranteed eight hours overtime per week. Her shift was strictly 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. Thursday through Sunday.
The only kicker in the deal was that if for any reason she left before the six months were up, she had to give back the bonus.
Obviously, she was unable to go up there and personally look the situation over, but she didn't just go up there blind. She made a few phone calls to the nurses in the unit that she would be working in, and called a few doctors up there to get their assessment of the hospital that would be her work place for the next six months.
They said it was a good situation, in a beautiful part of the country, but it was remote and they just had trouble enticing nurses from in-state into coming up there. Most of the nurses that came out of the schools in Idaho either wanted to stay in the more populated southern part of the state or they wanted to leave Idaho altogether.
Before she left, we set up the financial situation through the agency. She would take her signing bonus and start a bank account in Coeur d'Alene, and that, plus her per diem would provide the bulk of her spending money while she was there. Her paychecks would be directly deposited into our bank here, but she would have a bankcard she could use that would give her access to our account.
Tracy's always been pretty frugal with money, so I knew she wouldn't spend extravagantly, and besides, I didn't figure there was much she could blow her money on in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.
The timing was right for her to do this. Katherine, our oldest daughter, had just graduated from college the previous December, and there were no major milestones looming that would require her presence. Margaret, our other daughter, was living in a house with three other girls, and Chris, our son, had just gotten his driver's license and didn't have to be chauffeured all over any more.
We figured that if she could make a go of travel nursing, then perhaps I could retire and travel with her, after Chris finished high school. My field is one in which I can pretty much find part-time work anywhere and I liked the idea of moving about the country and spending time with my wife in places I'd never been.
Nevertheless, we knew the separation that first time would be difficult. We just never dreamed it would be as tough as it was.
Tracy was scheduled to start work on April 10, so she packed up her car on April 1 and with tears in both of our eyes, she took off for Idaho.
It took her four days to get up there, and she called every night on the way. Once she got up there, she began to get acclimated, went through the orientation process and found a place to live.
She was lucky, she said, to find another nurse there who had an apartment already rented and needed someone to share expenses. This was a slightly younger woman named Callie, who was from California.
The first six weeks were awful. We had never been apart for any length of time, and it was killing us. Or, at least it was killing me. After three weeks, I finally had to resort to masturbating because I was so horny. I didn't do it very often, but I did do it about once every couple of weeks.
Tracy and I have always had a very active sex life, and we are very adventurous as far as what we do together. Part of that includes some rather wild and crazy fantasies that we've shared with each other, and some mild role-playing.
I'm not sure when I began to notice that things were ... different. It wasn't anything I could put my finger on, but there was just something that wasn't right about the way she was talking to me on the phone – when I could get her on the phone.
At first, we talked every day whether she was off or not. Then we agreed that we would alternate days. I'd call her one day; she'd call the next. That worked until early June, when she missed a day.
It was a Thursday, her first day back to work after her three days off, but she still should have called. I'll be honest, I didn't notice it until 9 o'clock that night, and by then she was already at work.
For about a week before that, I'd sometimes call and she'd answer the phone – after it had rung a dozen times or more – and she'd sound a little breathless. And the conversations on those occasions would be pretty terse and awfully brief.
I called her the next day, right before I left work for the weekend, and she sounded fine. She apologized for not calling, but never explained why she didn't call. She called the next day, but sounded a little distant, like she had something on her mind. And when I called her the next day, I got her voice mail, an indication that she'd shut her phone off.
This went on through the month of June and into July. Some days she'd call on schedule, other days she wouldn't. Sometimes, when I called she'd answer, other times she wouldn't. Sometimes, when we talked she was her old sparkling self, other times she'd be distant, distracted and often breathless.
And when we did talk, really talk, she'd go on and on about the beauty of the area, and what a great person this roommate of hers was. They would often take their days off and drive into the mountains or go to the lake. The hospital was wonderful, not at all like what she'd left back here.
In short, she appeared to be having the time of her life and I was absolutely miserable. I missed being with my wife, missed being with my best friend, missed being with my lover, and, of course, it being summer in the Deep South, it was oppressively hot.
Moreover, I couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong, that Tracy was – dare I say it – having an affair.
By the end of July, our contacts were down to about once or twice a week, and I knew I had to do something. School was scheduled to start the second week of August, so I knew that if I was going to do anything, it would have to be the week before that.
