Left unchecked, medicine can easily dominate all aspect of life. This hits people at all stages of training and experience in medicine, but now that I've dipped my toe into residency, I think it likely hits residents the hardest. Residency means being both a learner and an employed junior physician, which has the unfortunate consequence of piling on both the open-ended responsibilities of a medical student to learn as much as possible, along with many (though not all) of the day-to-day responsibilities of an independent physician. Add on a situation of minimal control over one's own schedule and the need to continue to fight for a job on graduation, whether a fellowship or full employment, and medicine can easily take up every minute of the day, and every thought running through the brain.
For a small number of exceedingly passionate residents, this is exactly what they signed up for. Most residents, however, have parts of their life outside of medicine they would like to maintain or even prioritize, and that can become difficult in the metaphorical tempest of residency. Particularly when ambitions come into play, where a desired career path cannot be secured by simply showing up and performing well, medicine can push out those other, valued parts of life.
I'm finding myself falling into that trap early on in residency. I'm incredibly fortunate to be in a program with lower overall hours than many, and call schedules which are generally quite favourable. Yet this still means weeks far longer than a typical work week and the added time has largely gone towards maintaining a real sleep schedule and keeping up a rather bare-bones home life. My spare time now is still largely focused around medicine, either doing things for my career or, out of anxiety of having to do them all the time, unproductively procrastinating those activities.
As I was fairly ambitious in medical school, I've essentially been running on this medicine-focused treadmill for about 3 years straight now. I've learned this doesn't work well for my health, well-being, or even my achievement levels. I was able to scale-down my commitments later into my third year of medical school and into my fourth year. My choice to go into Family Medicine was influenced by this realization, a choice I'm quite happy with thus far if only for the sake of my own health.
Yet I'm still struggling with balancing my ambitions within medicine with my ambitions outside of my career. I want to do more as a physician, as I see so many opportunities to do a better job for patients. However, I've learned from experience that you can give everything you have to the medical system and end up causing more harm - especially to yourself and your loved ones - than you see in benefits for patients.
Prioritizing medicine above the rest of life didn't work and, in retrospect, many more senior physicians told me as much. So, I've tried to play a balancing act in the past year and a half, weighing any benefits to being more active in medicine with drawbacks to life outside of medicine. Again, for my health this has been a positive change, yet it comes with one major drawback - my life is still dominated by my medical career. Even if I choose not to pursue a new opportunity within residency, or put in an additional hour in a clinical setting, or do an extra bit of studying, I'm still making that decision with medicine as the focus. Unfortunately, this is leading to a fair bit of resentment towards my own medical career, without a countervailing positive in my non-medical life.
Therefore, I'm going to try to change tacks once again. Beyond trying to maintain a balancing act, I'm going to see how things work when life comes first. Before lifting an extra finger for the sake of a medical career that seems rather indifferent to my efforts, I'm going to try to make sure I have time for the non-medical things in life I care about. Getting a real amount of exercise. Spending quality time with my spouse. Watching the hockey game. Reading the newspaper. And if I'm really lucky, pursuing some hobbies I've had on the back-burner for years. Only then will I do the non-essential work in my medical career. My hope is that I can attack those activities in medicine with the vigor they deserve and which, over the course of the past 3 years, has waned from exhaustion and over-exposure.
Part of that is this, my Medical Blarg. This blog started as my way of actively de-stressing about being a medical student. As it unexpectedly gained viewership, it felt like the one activity in medicine that was leading to something productive. The encouragement to keep going from posters was immensely appreciated. Yet, it's hard for me to deny that as a result of its viewership, this blog has, in a way, also become a part of my medical career. There reached a time when posting felt more like an obligation that the enjoyable exercise it started out as. As a result, I've pulled back a bit on my posting frequency. My hope is that doing so allows me to continue to blog, but with a bit more enthusiasm and genuineness that I have been able to in the past few months.
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