sporadic, at best

more than a year has passed since my last post. here I am again at work with little to do but an obligation to stay awake and I didn't bring my knitting or crocheting to keep my fingers busy. instead, i've spent time surfing the web, reading up on my patients and still, it's 9:16 pm and not a lick to do. so i'm making a trip to the past. reading up on past versions of myself. it's been a pleasant stroll down memory lane.

to update my current status; I'm now a second year resident. actually, officially past the halfway point of my residency. which is both cool and frightening to think about. I'm on call in the PICU, a place that terrified me initially but somewhere I've grown accustomed to and somehow, comfortable in. Granted, it's been made much easier the second time around since the census is less than half of what it was during my first month and I actually have something of a clue of what the hell I'm doing. for the most part. i still maintain a healthy respect for my ignorance, don't get me wrong, but at least I feel somewhat comfortable with many parts of patient care.

i've been thinking a lot recently about how little I knew when I decided to take this life path. i try to picture myself back in my 21 year old shoes, a senior in college, due to graduate with degrees in political science and french in less than two months. no clue with what I was going to do with my life but assured that i squeezed the most out of my college experience. and then the concept hits me...why not be a doctor? i had been curious about it. I had considered it in a joking kind of way. but then, in the span of less than a week, I decided to do it. I extended my graduation date, changed life trajectories and finished pre-med. and then i got swept up in this whole concept of becoming a doctor and I felt like I couldn't look back. Like every time i thought about it, i felt too far along to change paths again. and I had no idea what i was getting myself in to. I had no idea how long the path would be and even what the final reward would be in the end. when I chose the pre-med route, I had no idea what the difference was between attending, fellow, resident, intern; I don't even think I knew those terms existed. and now that I do know, it boggles my mind how long this training path is. not including years off, I will have been in training for 16 years following high school graduation.

16 years.

to achieve what? certainly not fortune. my med school loans sometimes feel like an anvil on my chest or a bug in my ear, driving me crazy and crushing me under their weight. plus I have decided to go in to the worst paying specialty of them all. and i'm most likely going to go into the one of the worst paying sub-specialties as well.

certainly not fame. it's difficult to achieve any kind of wide-reaching notoriety as a doctor.

certainly not personal one-on-one care. these days, actual patient care is more often provided by nurses, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, physical therapists...pretty much everyone in the allied health profession besides doctors. as doctors, we are now relegated for the most part to teaching or research roles. pure patient care is becoming a thing of the past. it can be difficult these days to find a job purely based on taking care of patients and not requiring any kind of auxiliary services.

certainly not life-work balance. many women in this profession can't find the time or energy to be both good doctors and good wives/mothers. many women feel frustrated trying to choose between their careers and their families. shoot, I find it hard enough to spend quality time with my husband any my dog much less think about trying to start a family.

I'm really not trying to complain. honest. but working 80 hours a week, getting paid relatively little and occasionally being treated like I'm stuck to the bottom of someone's shoe really gets you down after awhile. in an overarching sense, I'm happy. I like my job. I like my co-workers. I like where I live. I love my family. but in talking to nurses and others around me, I sometimes wonder if I would have been better off pursuing that career. being a nurse seems awesome. you care directly for patients. you can be full time and work three days a week. you can travel and get paid pretty well. you can convert your job in to teaching or research or whatever you want it to be. you can switch specialties within nursing pretty easily. and you can do it all with just four years of an undergraduate degree. that's it. no additional school, no internship/residency/fellowship pathway. really the only drawback is that you have to deal with bullshit from doctors, many of whom have far fewer years of experience. and you don't ever get the final say about patient care. that's a pretty big sticking point for me. i like to be in control. or at least live under the illusion that i'm in control. and nurses do not usually have that power.

so is it worth it? i think so. like i said, i really am happy in real life. it's the thoughts that run through your head at night. when you're on call in the PICU again. and you just want to be home on the couch snuggling with your husband and your pup. that's when the doubt creeps in.