My wife and I followed the path we were told would work.

When we both matched into competitive resident physician training programs at UC San Diego, we were genuinely thrilled. It is a world-class institution with an incredible union that has fought for resident rights. We moved from the Midwest, leaving our families behind, because this was the opportunity we had worked for.

However, we didn’t want to wait until after we were done training to start a family, when we’d be in our mid-30s. We chose to become parents because it’d been our dream to have kids — so we decided to have a child during training. We now have a 1-year-old son.

But even at a place like UC San Diego, we are still losing money every month just to go to work.

Full-time daycare is expensive on its own, and we’re paying for nannies on top of that. To make the hours work, we coordinate three different caregivers. A morning nanny wakes our son, feeds him and brings him to daycare. He then spends all day at the daycare itself, which only opens after my wife and I start our shifts, and closes well before we are done with work. And so an evening nanny has to pick him up, make him dinner and put him to bed.

On the other hand, if we decide to do a full-time nanny for 80 hours a week at $25 an hour, that would cost us $2,000 a week — which would mean $8,000 a month. This is, of course, on top of other necessary expenses: rent, groceries, gas, utility bills, student loan repayments.

This is more than my take-home pay every month. We are in the red every single month just to show up at the hospital.

Since we do not have access to childcare throughout the nights when we are on call, we have contingency plans for the nights my wife and I are both on call. My wife is on call at the hospital, while I am home with our son. At 1 a.m., my pager goes off, alerting me to a surgery. I wake my 1-year-old, drive him to my wife’s hospital at 2 a.m., hand him to my wife in the lobby, drive to my hospital and go do surgery. Hours later, I pick him up, sleep an hour or two, and return to the operating room.

Residents are the backbone of the UC medical system. We staff the ICUs, deliver the babies, cover overnights and hold the hands of dying patients. Many of us are parents trying to hold our families together at the same time.

We are not asking for special treatment. We are asking not to be punished for having a family while serving as the backbone of this system. And we are asking UC to bargain in good faith and make support for resident parents real.

I love my patients. But caring for others is infinitely harder when I am constantly worried about my own child. Every morning, I leave my son with a nanny and care for someone else’s loved one, while wondering if my own is okay.

The University of California can change that. As a multibillion-dollar system, it has the means to provide wages and benefits that will allow us to afford living necessities and childcare without being in the red. It all starts with the bargaining table.

Rosenberg is the urologic surgery chief resident at UC San Diego.