It's been a while!
Hey guys, It's been a while! Ive just sat and read through every post on this blog and it made me so sad. Not only to remember how low I was back then, but to remember what an absolute shit deal we have as doctors. And it's just getting worse. Doctors are taking their own lives, and I think every single one of us can empathise with someone getting to a place where that seems like the only way out. I read one of my earlier blog entries where I talk about 'thinking how I can break my leg as painlessly as possible in order to get a few weeks off work' - I remember driving into work and wondering what speed I could crash my car, not to die, but to hurt myself enough to get some time off. I remember being envious of sick, unwell patients, because they were laid watching Jeremy Kyle while I was sweating with a million and one jobs to complete. It really was that desperate. When would that escalate to more? I am SO happy where I am right now (I'll come on to that in a bit) , and so to think about those thought processes right now is horrendous. Horrendous that I would consider hurting myself to get out of a situation. A situation I felt trapped in. What's scarier is that every time I've discussed this with another medic, they admit to feeling the same way, on many occasions. It's the feeling of 'there's no way out of this'. We're made to feel trapped. We're all the 'smart kids of the class' who always succeeded. We all worked our arses off, sacrificed huge chunks of our youth to getting the best grades, doing the extracurricular stuff that's needed to get into Med school. But it was ok, you work hard, you get what you want, is what we are told. Then we spent all of those exhausting years at medical school, doing 9am - 6pm lectures, Monday - Friday, when our friends on other courses just had a few hours here and there. But it's ok, we want to be doctors, we need to work hard. Then we moved on to clinical placements and spent our weeks devoted to the hospital, taking every opportunity to learn, going in on weekends, at night, as soon enough we would be there, working, in our dream job... Then before you know it, bam! We are doctors, and it's definitely not all it's cracked up to be... All that time, all that dedication, we need to push through. Right?? I'm unhappy but it would be a huge waste to just quit and do something else. Right? ..... Wrong. Life is complicated. I've done some really cool, really bizarre things over the last year or so, that I will talk about in following blogs, and these things have really made me realise this. It is so so complicated. And we aren't prepared for this. At school and throughout our education, having a good stable job is put up there as one of the most important things to achieve. Having a big house, a nice car, a family with a dog and 2.5 kids (or whatever the saying is!) will bring us all the happiness we need. It's "that simple"! And we were always pretty confident that our efforts of getting to where we now are, these high flying successful doctors, would secure this for us. I mean we're doctors! People sound so impressed when you tell them this, we must be so rich and have amazing holidays and lovely big houses... We must be so happy right?! If you are anything like me, you will have gotten to a point, maybe mid F1, where you really started to realise that money and material objects do not bring happiness. This job, this job stability, definitely does not bring happiness. I remember being offered £1000 to work a weekend that the hospital was really short staffed for, and I remember thinking no amount of money could get me to stay in that hospital for a second longer than I had to. When you have no time, time becomes priceless. I didn't want more money, I wanted more time. A weekend, out of the hospital, to do things that you enjoy, with the people you love, really has no price. For me, no amount of money could get me to do an extra on call weekend. And I think many of you are the same. So, if we aren't doing this for the money, what are we doing it for? This was the question I really started to ask myself... I always wanted to make a difference, I enjoyed the challenge being a doctor presented; I like applying the physiology and pathology I've learnt to real life scenarios, and seeing people get well is the most rewarding situation. The moment a family thanks you, sincerely, for helping their relative, well, you really can't describe that to anyone who hasn't experienced it, and as rare as 'thanks' are, they really do make you remember why you are doing what you are doing. I started to note good and bad days, simply using a tally chart. And I would recommend this to everyone struggling with their career choice right now. Just to see the reality of the situation. It's easy to let a bad situation cloud your judgement and forget about all the good points... Well, for me the tally chart made up my mind, of 100 days at work, I had 88 bad and 12 good. Could I really justify what I was going through for a 12% chance my day wouldn't be horrendous? No chance! Something had to change. So I took a step out of training, and that's where my last posts left off. I made sure I finished F2. I know it's not easy for everyone, but It's worth getting to the end of, as it gives you the freedom, and safety net, of knowing you can go back to training whenever you want, should you want. I'm now approaching "F5" as I like to call it, and I can honestly say it was the best decision of my life. I've blabbed on a while now, I'm currently in San Diego about to go out for margaritas and chill by the beach (for real!) but I'll write another blog post tomorrow about everything I've been up to and why it's working amazingly for me!
