On Endings and Beginnings

Hello....hello....hello. 

Wow. Um. Not really sure where to start.

I quit my job. I am no longer a rural GP-Surgeon. So, there's that. I moved. Enrolled in a Dermatology Diploma through Cardiff University, got a new full time job, a part-time locum. Oh and a full time LIFE again.

I bought a new house, adopted a second dog, moved. Is that everything? I guess that is the big stuff.

It's awkward as I have so much back tracking and so many half written half cocked stories and posts and its overwhelming. And were does one pick up the thread?

I will start by saying that physician burnout is a real thing. I read somewhere recently that around 80% of physicians in their first year of practice report feelings of burnout. It made me feel reassured. I haven't really sat down and dissected the past 15 months since finishing to see if the diagnosis would be burnout but I can certainly see that there were moments, really long moments that lasted weeks or months at a time where the over arching theme could be described as "burnout". Sure.

And I cycled through the emotions of feeling guilty for being overwhelmed when I should have actually felt good that I was acknowledging that too much was being asked of me. Feeling I was weak instead of seeing that the load was too heavy, and all of that.

So now I'm staring at all these books in my basement. Do I get rid of the stacks of emergency medicine books? ECG guides, Operative Obstetrics, Mastery of Surgery, Palliative Medicine? I have Care of the Newborn and PALS guides strewn beside Colorectal Disease atlases and AIME study manuals. It's nearly comical. I am letting go of some of my skills, some of my training but I am weirdly clinging onto these books. I am not a nostalgic person. Ever since I Marie Kondo'ed the shit out of my house 2 moves ago I have paired down and donated, sold, and dumped a lot of my belongings. These books feel like haunting reminders of the person I thought I wanted to be or the person I thought I'd become.

When people would ask me, "How are you?" at work my response was always "living the dream!" And this was an intentional response (for me) even though it may have sounded flippant. I said that because if you go back, all the way back to even before this blog started, I wanted to be a rural physician. A rural emerg or rural gp-surgeon or full scope rural GP. I turned my life upside down. I left my house in the mountains, all my friends, all my family. I left my financial security and traded it for crushing debt. I left the freedom to chose where I got to live. I left my hobbies, my boyfriend, my favourite recreation. I left my country! I traded all of that in to become a doctor. I came back to Canada and was lucky enough to land a residency in a fantastic rural program. Then landed another residency in enhanced surgical skills. Then I was offered a full time job in a full scope GP service practice in a place that I had spent 6 months as a resident. And everything was just finally lining up perfectly and I was reaching the end goal of 8 years of moving, studying, exam writing, wondering, hoping, and guessing.

And my "dream" finally came true.

And then it all went to shit.

So I purposefully reminded myself every single time someone asked me how I was doing, that I was in fact, living my dream. It's so easy to remain in this goal oriented, delayed gratification, head down, life will be great when....mentality. "At the coal face" as my husband describes it. You are in survival mode, you don't look up you just grind grind grind. You will one day live your dream, you tell yourself.

Then you arrive and the unicorns aren't sliding down rainbows to greet you. I can't even go back and read the post I wrote when I finished medical school because I may actually punch myself if I do. I was taught this lesson before but I suppose I never learned it.

I wanted to remind myself so I could stay in the moment. So I could find that thing and see the beauty in where I was even when it felt like it was crushing me. Something had drawn me to this exact place in the world so I had find those rewards and acknowledge them. Even when it felt really really hard.

I'm sure there are many, many people who chase certain goals in medicine, and achieve those goals and the rainbows and unicorns are there to greet them when they do. And to those I say, "you're so lucky". But to anyone reading this who felt weird and sad and stressed and unfulfilled when you finally got to live your dream I say, "you are not alone, dude".

So I finally gathered up the courage to admit all these things to myself and those around me. And here I am. Trying to focus on how I am going to make this whole medicine thing work for me, instead of the other way around.

To be continued.