What happened? Sitting back in my chair, I studied her. The buoyant, excitable 9 year old I had met when H's family first started coming to see me had been replaced by this sullen teenager in bedazzled Converses who now had the telltale signs of cutting on her non-dominant forearm. "How are you sleeping?" "Fine." "Tell me about the things you're eating." "All junk food." H stuck her chin out defiantly as she declared this, almost as if to say, I dare you to tell me I'm fat.
We have allowed work to become this all consuming part of our lives, and not just in medicine. It's too easy to become married to our jobs, forgetting there are people at home who are more deserving of our time and attention. When will I allow myself to say doctoring needs to be just a job and not my life - and when will I actually believe it? What is life when it's no longer defined by work?
Why do I check in on my vacation days? Because these are MY patients. That is MY 18 year old, that is MY 2 month old. I will take care of them as if they are my own family, because we should expect no less from our physicians. And when they suffer, I do too.
"I'll see you in 6 months, ok?" I said as I exited the patient room. Flashing a smile, I waved goodbye and turned to see my 4 medical assistants huddled around the closest workstation. All staring at me.  Imagery of hunters circling their felled prey before they delivered the final death blow flashed in my mind. Sympathy intermixed with indecision as to when exactly was the right moment to strike. "What.... ?" I asked, a little disconcerted. After what felt like an eternity, one of them spoke up. "C just called to let us know his wife, R, just died from a stroke. He wanted to thank you for everything, but he doesn't need her appointment now." "Oh. Okay." Silence punctuated with shocked faces by my curt reply. "Are you ok, Dr. M?" Was I OK?
Confession time: I almost quit blogging 20,000 page views brought me to my knees. I was humbled that people were actually reading my ramblings. Elated that people were commenting on the posts and emailing me about how my story resonated with them. Then the OH SHIT moment happened. Did I really want that many people peering into my mind?
Truth be told, I've never felt I needed a designated mentor - not in pre-med, med school or residency. Ain't nobody got time for that. Wrong.
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.