The Rota Saga

Change jobs on Wednesday, still no rota so I've no idea what I'm doing for the next 4 months. Which weekends am I working? When can I take annual leave or is it allocated? Am I unreasonable in thinking we should have had this rota weeks ago? Not impressed.

Will really miss A+E, not looking forward to orthopaedics despite always having considered it as a career. Being the 'orthopaedic opinion' should be interesting, even more so on nights when I'm responsible for all surgical admissions too!

Quarter Life Crisis

I should probably elaborate on my last post a little. According to wikipedia I'm having a quarter life crisis, a time usually in the mid twenties where one is no longer a young and care free individual but at the same time not quite ready to cross the line into being a true 'grown up'. It is perhaps a little cliche and even melodramatic to describe this as a crisis but there doesn't seem like a better way!

I'm currently working as an F2 in A+E, a job which I enjoy and dislike equally. It is tremendously interesting, varied and requires much improvisation but the shifts are a pain in the arse, some of the staff rather useless and I don't feel I'm particularly good at it. The reason for the last point is I lack the depth of medical knowledge (partly through being a lazy medical student and partly through being at a shit medical school) I also have a crisis of self-confidence in A+E, something I'm not really used to. Another thing that doesn't help is I'm staying in hospital accommodation during the week and only seeing missbliss when I'm not working (which is rare in A+E). I hate my prison cell room with a passion but it's the cheapest, most convenient option. One thing I do know is that I will really miss A+E as a job but will be glad to be rid of the shifts!

Careerwise, I'm pleased to say that medicine is for me, I just have no idea what specialty. I know I almost certainly don't want to do general medicine although I would love to have the level of knowledge that goes with being a medical registrar! I've always had a passion for orthopaedics but have next to zero anatomy knowledge and am not quite the right personality type. I've also always liked and been quite good at radiology but I suspect that would bore me and I miss the acute side of things. A+E is great fun but the politics and shifts are hurrendous! GP land would suit my personality and lifestyle but again I would find it rather dull. The option of being a GP with an interest in A+E might be a possibility to combine the best of both worlds, I have spoken to GPs who do this so I know it is possible but am not sure how easy it would be.

So where does this leave me? Well specialty training applications open in a month and I haven't a clue. The other option is New Zealand for a year but whether that would help I don't know, I suspect it would just be a postponement of the same issues but at least it would be an interesting adventure!

Crisis might be a strong word but it is all I can think about at the moment and it's driving me a little bit crazy and making me feel useless! Although I'm not quite at the stage of buying a bright red sports car (as much as I'd love to, I don't have the money). And the loose women? well that just doesn't appeal in the slightest, I'm quite happy with missbliss thanks!

Any advice would be grately appreciated.

Hi

For anyone still reading - what shall I do with my life?

Alive

I'm alive

Surgery is well over and done with now - It was a rather odd experience really but I miss it

My new job is a bit strange too, I feel like I've hardly worked this past month and a half but its because its a strange rota and all my leave is used up now

Medical nights start tonight for 4 nights - HELL!

Hope you're all fine and dandy

Time

Work is hard at the moment, I'm working 11 hour days most days at the moment excluding on calls (EWTD my arse) and it's going to get worse over the next month as 1 of us will be doing the job of 2 people as we use up our annual leave! I'm working the weekend ( if I've not contracted norovirus) and frankly things are starting to do my head in - mostly incomptence an uselessness on the part of other people.

Anyway when is one supposed to do the things that everyone else always seems to have time to do?

Half Way

This year's cohort of 'new' doctors have just passed the half-way point, this includes me. Six months down, six paydays celebrated, and a wealth of experience gained. They say time flies when you're having fun and time  has certainly flown by, does this mean it has been fun? Well.... yes on the whole it has. I very pleased to say that I really enjoy what I do most of the time, in fact the only thing I hate  about the job  is pre-op assessment (where the surgical F1s see elective surgical cases a week or so before they are admitted to pick up any potential problems which might be encountered). I'm not sure why I hate pre-op so much, I just find the whole process horrendously boring.

Things I have learnt in the past 6 months include:

1.  I don't enjoy being fast-bleeped - it generally means something catastrophic has happened

2. There are some awfully sad things that happen to people

3. Nobody else likes the crust ends of bread loaves - which suits me!

4. Bourbon biscuits are the most popular among doctors

5. Looking into someone's eyes as they die unexpectedly is something you don't forget in a hurry

6. Most surgical stereotypes are true

7. The way to a nurse's heart is chocolate cake

8. Medicine is infinitely more imprecise than textbooks would have you believe

9. I am stoical - apparently

10. I don't have the faintest clue what I want to do...

I wrote last just before I started my surgical post and frankly I was dreading it because of the reputation it has. The past two months haven't been anywhere near as bad as I was expecting. It is rather busy and I tend to finish later than I did when doing medicine but it could be much worse. Surgery is a lot different to medicine; medicine was busy but steady all day long but surgery, at least as a house officer, is chaos from 8 till 9am then ridiculously quiet for much of the day until about 4pm when things generally start to go tits up, blood results come back and patients for the next day come in. 

Before I even went to medical school I wanted to be a surgeon, this ambition continued throughout medical school but I'm not a stereotypical surgeon and I'm now having somewhat of a career life crisis as I try and figure out what the hell I want to do. I really enjoy the practical aspects which points me towards surgery but there is this whole surgical ethos which I just can't find it in myself to agree with. A big consideration has to be the sort of colleagues you're going to have in future and I'm just not sure I'm a surgeon. After 2 months of surgery, I can see myself being absorbed by the attitude and I don't like it at all. I enjoyed my medicine job far more than I thought I might but the idea of being a medical registrar scare the bajesus out of me! The only thing I think I'm certain on is that I like hospital medicine rather than general practice - but I'm not even 100% sure of this. Some might say its a little early to be worrying abut this but in less than 12 months I'll have to apply for a specialty. 

In the meantime I hope to continue having fun and gaining more experience.

Lost - Reward For Return: The Last 4 Months

It has been over a month since my last blog, and after I promised an update within the week. For those of you that are still around I thought I'd pop by and say hello. The last 4 months have flown by, my first job is over and it is sad times indeed. It doesn't seem like 2 minutes since I set foot on the ward for the first time with no clue as to what I was doing. 4 months later and I was just getting settled and its time to move on. I've really enjoyed my first job, it has been interesting and a fairly gentle introduction but most of all, the team on the ward were fantastic.  Everyone was lovely and it was a really friendly atmosphere, I think that is what I'm going to miss the most. I never expected to become attached to the job like I did. 

Perhaps what makes it worse is that I'm going from probably one of the best jobs to probably the worst! Frankly, I'm shitting bricks and I'm talking breeze blocks here! On Friday evening as I sat talking to the outgoing F1 of my new job my worst fears became a reality. Whenever anybody has asked me what I'm doing next and I've answered, it has been swiftly followed by a sympathetic sharp intake of breath. I'd spent the last few weeks in denial thinking it was a long time before I'd have to worry about that but now I'm 24 hours away from hell. From what I hear, the job is a bitch, the people hostile and the atmosphere terrifying. I've seen many of my colleagues stressed, upset and crying (mostly the outgoing two who's job becomes mine on Monday).

I'm hoping things will be different, and I intend to be optimistic, at least till 5pm on Monday (although it'll probably be more like 11pm). On the plus side it might give me a bit more blogging material. Most of the other surgical F1s seem to spend most of their time chilling out in the mess, I've never, ever seen my 2 predecessors in the mess. I've spent the last 4 months enjoying myself and feeling sorry for those having an awful time but now I suspect it's my turn. 

Oh, and in other big news, I think I might be a closet medic rather than a surgeon!

Cookie Adventure

Check out my cookie adventure here

Time Flies When You're ..... Busy

It has been 2 weeks since my last blog and now I begin to realise that a fair proportion of my time is being consumed by work. I can barely imagine how things must have been only a few years ago with 100+ hour weeks. This week though I am on holiday! By holiday I mean staying at home rather than going to work, this means I actually get some time to do things I would have normally done during the day as a student. It also gives me time to catch up with several thousand blog posts in my google reader, I've just spent the last couple of hours skim reading far too many blog posts! I'm now as up to date as I'll ever be. Now I've caught up the prospect of reading blogs again isn't quite as scary.

I've already been bleeped several times since being on holiday - I've not answered of course (I did that once as I was expecting a call and have been chastised ever since) but there is a sense of curiosity - who is it and what do they want? 

Today I decided to bake double chocolate chip cookies (they are bloody good too). For no other reason than because I could. Perhaps working life is sending me slightly insane. I'm still enjoying being a doctor, although at times my job can be a bit stale (mainly due to the nature of my post). Nevertheless, during the day, time passes quickly and inevitably there isn't enough time in the day to do everything. When on ward cover - time either flies, when you're busy, or trickles by if you're sat in the mess. I definitely prefer being busy. 

I have little else to say at the moment, although I do have plenty of potential blogging topics on the cards. I'm going to try a little and often approach to blogging to see if I can get back into the zone. I'll be back before the end of the week... I promise.

Oh, and finally, I bought myself an iPhone 3G - it rocks my socks!

Working Nine to Five - or not even close.

Ok, so I promised to blog the weekend before last and didn't. The main reason for this is that we now have 4 dead laptops in our house (don't ask what we do to them - I've no idea). Anyway, we've just got a desktop courtesy of missbliss's parents (thank you :))  Of course there is also the other matter of being quite busy. This whole working thing is rather annoying, most of the time I'm only supposed to work 8 hour days, at least that's what the hospital would like to think (naturally we are EWTD compliant). This makes life difficult enough, especially when you consider I've not done an 8hr day yet! When the bloody hell are you supposed to go to the bank when you have a job? When are you supposed to go and spend your hard earned cash? I barely have enough time to wee during the day let alone leave the hospital! I don't mind being busy as it makes the time go quickly but I could do with a 4 day week just so that I can do everything I need to do outside of work. 24hr Manchester had its advantages in that respect. This makes time for blogging a little short - but now we have a computer which hopefully will work for more than 2 days, it should be easier!

I've just finished what should have been 12 days straight, actually I had friday off so it was infact only 11 days. My day off wasn't much of a holiday though, apart from a yuppie-esque lunch in town with missbliss who was working, I spent all day catching up on real-life admin - bore. It was my first weekend 'on call' (basically ward cover for about 200-300 patients) last weekend and it was genuinely the most stressful weekend of my entire life. Not in a oh my god I can't do this way but in a holy shit what the hell is going on way. The fact I had some really great senior staff probably prevented me from the complete emotional collapse that some of my colleagues have had. I can safely say that it isn't fun when someone is effectively bleeding half of their circulating volume out through their rectum right in front of you. Overall, apart from the fact it was a weekend, I quite enjoyed myself - although I'm not rushing to do another one! The responsibility is bloody scary but at the same time quite exhilarating, the chance to see and do some acute medicine is refreshing compared to my usually quite stable ward patients. 

Inevitably, with independence and lack of experience come mistakes - I don't know whether or not I've made any yet, particularly as I rarely see again the patients I see when on ward cover. The hardest thing about being on cover is prioritising things, that is the key. In fact, the same can be said for the whole of medicine. When your bleep is going off every 5 minutes, not only do you have to be organised but you also have to have a way of triaging things in your head. Some jobs can be done in minutes but complex and ill patients can take hours. Am I supposed to run off and answer my bleep every time I'm in the middle of something? It might be polite, but it is completely impractical. For me this was one of the hardest things to get used to, although sometimes I regret answering - for example when switchboard have for some reason given my bleep to a very persistent job-seeking cleaner, seriously, like I don't have more important things to worry about!

P.S - when sorting through our music on our shiny (old) desktop I discovered missbliss has no fewer than 9 copies of Dolly Parton's, Working 9 to 5.