Dubious, but Posting Anyways

Here's a column to think about from The New York Times this weekend.  I'm not sure I agree with the author's findings that highly educated women are more likely to get married (did they poll any female surgeons??), but it's interesting reading. 

FOMO

I was talking to my dear friend C the other day on the phone and she asked me about my recent trip to Hawaii.  Except that it really wasn't that recent.  It was in December.  It has been over two months since I have seen or talked to her.

This month, I am on call for three out of the four weekends.  This has been pretty standard for most of my clinical year thus far.  Most of the time, the fact that I basically have no life outside of medicine doesn't really bother me.  Most of the time, I am too busy and too sleep-deprived to really even realize how each day melts into the next while real/normal life is going on around me.  I am always surrounded by my co-fellows (wonderful people without whom I'm not sure I would possess even the modicum of sanity that I have) and loads of people from patients to support staff.

And yet, if I stop for just a second (and manage to not fall asleep), I realize that there is something missing.

My co-fellow Thor described it most aptly: our lives are on hiatus.

I try not to say this often, but it's really something that non-medical people can't understand.  Just the level to which your freedom is restricted in the medical profession.  The times when I feel it the most are when I'm walking home from the hospital.  On a Friday or Saturday night at midnight, as I walk home from the hospital, looking crappy in my scrubs, exhausted and physically sore in every muscle from operating, I see all of the "normal people" sitting in bars with their friends, talking, laughing, enjoying a few beers.  Or on a Sunday afternoon, as I hustle back to the hospital to see yet another consult, I see "normal people" sitting outside enjoying brunch with their family or friends.  Even when I was a medical student, I spent hours at a Borders bookstore cafe with my best friend on a Saturday afternoon with a pile of medical reading.  Occasionally, we would look up, bleary-eyed, jealous of the people around us reading The Atlantic and Glamour.

I can't have a beer anymore--I'm always tied to my pager and worry that a patient may have an MI.  I can't make plans for Sunday brunch--I can't leave a certain radius of the hospital and I just don't know if I'll be able to get out of the hospital on time.  And on the precious weekends I do have off?  I take care of all of the errands I couldn't take care of--buying groceries, paying bills, watering plants, cleaning, cooking, laundry, calling my family.  And often those things go by the wayside because I end up not being able to move from my bed.  Trying to pay off my sleep debt.  Catching up on "medical jetlag."

I'm proud of what I do and love what I do.  I realize that I get to do something that few people get to do and that specialized knowledge comes with a price.  I also realize that, as a consequence, I will never be a perfectly "normal person" with a 9 to 5 job, but that there is going to be a time when I will be closer to that than I am now.  That in fact, this is a hiatus and one day I will be back to normal-ish life.  And when that day comes, I will order a beer at a pub on a Sunday afternoon, watch football with my friends, laugh and joke, and be grateful for every minute of it.