Anyone telling someone that part time work is easy is just rude, but in medicine it’s particularly annoying, since it’s not even necessarly true that people who work part time work part time hours. Part time GPs end up basically doing 40+ hours when admin is taken into account. Full time GPs? Even more than that. Hospital doctors might do less overtime, but we make up for it in physical legwork. I don’t even walk quite as much as you on my recent shifts, and the km I do manage to put in on those shifts are more than tiring enough! I can’t imagine how annoying it must be to walk 25K on shifts then get told you’ve got it easy. No wonder you’re fuming.
I can’t believe someone lecturing you on how to spend your free time when frankly, the medical life is so exhausting that when you get home, sometimes all you can do is zone out, eat and sleep. And repeat that the next day. I found med school tiring (as my family often jokes, I basically napped my way through the clinical years), but it was only when I graduated that I took exhaustion to a new level. I do find that I sometimes just have to say “I can’t do that right now, I’m exhausted and literally don’t have the energy”, so I can’t imagine what it would be like to deal with more of that because “you’re working part time therefore should have the time for that”.
Going back to jobs in general, to build on your excellent points.I feel it’d be unfair to say other jobs are easy, after all, every job is tiring, and I wouldn’t tell my friends who do office work that their job is easy when that’s neither true nor fair. Which is, I know, not what you were saying, but it’s how medics sometimes come across when we talk about our work, so I wanted to clarify. Because it can be hard to have this conversation without it turning into some kind of competition, which it doesn’t need to be. For what it’s worth, I think people like paramedics or the fire brigade do jobs that are much more tiring or harrowing than ours.
It’s true that plenty of jobs are more physically exhausting than medicine, It doesn’t compare to, say, manual labour, but itprobably involves a similar amount of standing/running to being on a busy shop floor. Hospital medicine (and nursing) does involve more exertion than sitting at a desk for most of the day.
There are definitely many 12h shifts where you spend the entire time on your feet, dashing from one patient to another, with barely time to sit down. And I dare anyone to tell me that’s not exhausting.
It’s also a job that (at least in the UK) often requires staying late, or filling paperwork in your spare time, or doing audits, or getting your training done; so on top of those long hours, you then have to sit down and do work-related things in your limited spare time. It’s not a job that you can ‘clock off’ and switch off from. Most of my non-medical friends have the benefit that when they stop working, they can stop thinking about work, or their career, and jus enjoy their free time. Meanwhile I have to get back from a 12h job, worry about passing the next exam or progressing with my portfolio, and get some work done on that aspect of my job.
You’re also spot on that it’s mentally exhausting; when I volunteered and say, filled envelopes or served lunches, I sometimes got a lot done in a short space of time, but it was nowhere near as tiring for me as dealing with patients. When you’re making complex clinical decisions that involve juggling around a lot of clinically relevant information in your head, it can also be exhausting. You’re not just deciding on simple things, but weighing up on complex options and then discussing them with the patients, your colleagues, your seniors. The responsibility weighs on you, and you can end up anxious about decisions they are making. Lastly, it’s also emotionally exhausting; many jobs are tiring physically, and lots of office jobs still require quite a bit of mental work, but most people don’t need to worry about accidentally killing someone if something goes wrong. We’re dealing with people at the worst times in their lives; people who are scared, upset, sick and whose loved ones are in distress. We’re breaking bad news. It’s incredibly emotionally draining.
I can definitely say that working in medicine taught me what it is to be physically tired, but also mentally exhausted, and emotionally wiped out; that’s why I always say that there are different types of fatigue. Medicine isn’t necessarily the hardest job, but it can be physically, mentally and emotionally exhausting and take over your time off as well.
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