Opinion: The day my wife miscarried, I went back to work at the hospital. I still regret that

The day began the same as every day had begun for the last few months. But it ended very differently, with a choice that I would come to regret.

I was tired — exhausted, actually. It was the cumulative fatigue from too little sleep. My two young children interrupted my sleep at home; my pager did the same thing at the hospital. It was the type of fatigue that envelops the brain in a dense fog, altering the way you see and hear the world around you, the type that deadens your ability to think clearly and process efficiently.

The alarm clock woke me at 5 a.m. for my shift as the senior resident on call for a busy general medicine service in a large, urban hospital in Chicago. I mindlessly got ready and drove to work, leaving behind my 10-month-old daughter, 3-year-old son, and pregnant wife.

A few hours later, while in