It was like watching an accident and knowing there was nothing we could do to prevent it.
I was going to be traveling for work to a remote location and had decided to bring my whole family along, including my husband and two little kids, aged 3 and 1. I worked busy clinic days, some nights and weekends as well, while my husband worked remotely from his laptop.
We would be spending the time in a two-bedroom house on the hospital campus with beds, sofas, a television, and not much else. The neighborhood had a few playgrounds, but the town itself didn’t have much for kids—a movie theater that stopped showing the only G-rated film the week before we arrived, a coffee shop that was closed for renovations, and a handful of restaurants that posted irregular hours on Facebook. We’d be gone for two weeks, and we weren’t bringing any …