Now as I am looking forward to what the next step in my journey will be and the guilt that ensues with the thought of leaving my current practice, I have to remember - there will be patients who will remember our relationship fondly. There will be patients who would be willing to follow me. There is far more gratitude and grace that I've somehow forgotten along the way.
While I've been researching various ways to get myself out of my current job aka mindlessly scrolling on Facebook physician groups in search of ideas to jolt me out of complacency, I've had an epiphany: Most of the people active in these groups are women. Why is that? Are women just more active on social media than men? As I paid more and more attention to the common threads of their posts and comments, I realized they were more vocal than the men in the groups about the need for more work life balance. Being able to spend time with their kids. Less time spent with emotionally exhausting patients. More time to be able to take care of things at home, ailing parents, so on and so forth. I marveled at the marked difference between the men and women's comments to my husband J, wondering out loud, "Do men just not care about the same things that women do? I mean - they have families too. Don't they also want to spend more time with their kids? Don't they also have things to take care of at home? I don't get it." J shrugged and replied, "It's not that they don't care... these guys probably just have stay at home wives who take care of everything."
As I observe the spending habits of my patients, friends and fellow doctors, I find we are in a constant state of consumption. We're all chasing that thing that will make our life complete - the newest phone, fitness tracker, piece of clothing... you name it, the marketing gods will instill in you the "need" for you to have it. Inevitably though, it's never enough.
We have been conditioned to think of work as the end all, be all of life. But if you were to ask people what they regret the most at the end of life as Bronnie Ware had, they would say this: I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. I wish that I had let myself be happier. What are we doing with our lives?
Doctors, PA's, nurses and medical assistants only exist to help people in their time of need. This is what we signed up for. This is what I signed up for, and I did this knowingly with my eyes wide open. I just didn't anticipate the toll that this would take on me now in my 7th year since graduating from medical school.
I love medicine - the puzzle of it all, the thrill of getting to the right diagnosis, the fact that my skill set can actually help people. But what I'm doing now is no longer medicine. Perhaps it's time to break up with my primary care medicine experiment.
I just spent the entire morning planning my escape from medicine. I don't even know how the ball started rolling, but I found myself lost in the math trying to figure exactly how little I needed to live on. I've long known the 4% rule - if you can live off of 4% of your total investments, you could presumably retire. Are you good on $40,000/year? Your number = $1,000,000. What could I cut back on to get to my personal number?
How will I restock my joy fund? I'm going to start by finding joy and gratitude daily. And because I'm a sucker for goal oriented achievements - this is how I'm going to do it → 30 Day Challenge: Restocking My Joy Fund In an effort of accountability, I'm going document my journey on Instagram - come join me HERE.
It all seemed simple back in medical school. X + Y = Z. All the possible answers were available in multiple choice: A, B, C, D or E. But I wasn't warned of these times - the space between the question set up and the answer.
The last week has been a little surreal. My KevinMD post: Should we encourage people to go into medicine went viral in a way I hadn't anticipated with more than 2000 shares! It's been a roller coaster of conflicting emotions: Happiness that my writing resonated with so many people Horror that someone called me a "thought leader" for the millennial generation Guilt for making people in med school/residency aware of their regret for going into medicine