Horizontal

That feeling.

When your feet are finally at the level of your heart. Your blood is returned without having to fight gravity. You feel the throb deep in your heels, the heaviness in your bones. There is a thin film of sweat covering your body but you don't care. All you care about is the fact that you are no longer standing, reaching, bending, pulling, straining, and concentrating. This moment, this...is bliss. You're not breathing in your own carbon dioxide or trying to see through your fogged eye protection.

You are finally horizontal. The scenes from the day intrusively play themselves out behind your eyelids but you don't care because you are still, silent, and free.

For a few hours.

Dr. Albinoblackbear, CCFP.

Hello Ye Dedicated Readers of My Blog.

I keep thinking about shutting the blog down but then I realized, I can't do it before I finish residency! There are so many unfinished, undocumented, unknown endings in health care, I hate to add this blog to the list of "remember that guy...what ever happened to him?" narratives.

Well nothing has really happened yet. It's all still happening.

I wrote the CCFP / LMCC 2 at the end of April and early May. I finished off my residency in a lovely little community where I had the opportunity to do some ER, some obs, some endoscopy, some surgery. They were a fantastic group of docs who offered me work there when I was done and I was so wishing I could say yes.

Seeing my cohort getting their offices together, planning European vacations, talking about paying down debt, I can't help but ask myself, "what was I thinking signing up for another year of residency?!?!"

To make matters worse, Duncan got a job in BC and is moving back there uhhhh tomorrow.  The job opportunity for him came a few months after I had accepted the PGY3 year training spot. So here I sit, watching him pack up and get ready to move back to my favorite place on earth, and I wonder, "what in the deluded hell was I thinking signing up for another year of residency?!?!"

So yeah. I have another year of training and two more years return of service here before I'll be able to join my husband-to-be-who-will-be-my-husband-by-then in BC. Until then, it'll be a looooooooooooong distance thing, I guess. Good old medicine. It isn't a train you can really get off if the destination starts to look less inviting.

I get a lot of emails from people who come across the blog. They ask me if they should apply for medicine or how to go about doing so. I think no one wants to really hear the real story. I feel like people want a Facebook version of events: big emotional moments where you save the day and feel validated, you steal an hour of two of sleep in call rooms with freshly laundered sheets then drive home in the morning, exhausted yet buoyed by the knowledge you made a difference. Really, it is just a lot of sacrifices and a lot of (mostly scut) work.

I started medical school when I was 30. I am not going to be done my training/return of service until I am 39. That is not an insignificant amount of time to hand-over in exchange for a new career. Putting on hold the place I want to live, a hold on having a family, a hold on traveling adventures, spending time with the people I value.

Many nurses have asked me "was it worth it?" to which I usually reply "ask me in 10 years". I really can't tell yet. I'm still too in it. Now I'm in horrific debt and have a lot more stress than when I was an RN. There were things I loved about nursing and things I hated about it, the same goes for residency. It's not better (yet) that is for sure.