When I first thought about creating this blog, it was to vent – vent about all the negative experiences I have had so far in my career as a physician.
There are many things which we generally don’t speak of publicly, such as the ever-taboo topics of politics, religion and social order.
However, we also don’t discuss how we feel when a patient dies, or our struggles with balancing our personal lives with our work demands, or our conflicts with colleagues/employers, or when we have our own health challenges, or when we’re simply tired of being a part of the bureaucratic wheel without being able to affect positive changes in the lives of our patients, or when some of those patients test our patience and sanity, or when we need a break.
Very few of us ever speak out individually, preferring to bottle things up, or knock back a bottle…
Because we’re afraid to speak.
Because we don’t want to be judged when the world expects us to be invincible.
Because we are expected to be superhuman.
But we’re not.
We (in the US) have the highest suicide rates of ANY profession.
It’s a sad end to all the years of blood, sweat and tears shed to establish ourselves as professionals.
I hope that through our “confessions”, my colleagues can find empathy, some (possibly dark) humour here and there, and a sense of advocacy in challenging the status quo of silence.
I also hope that the non-physician readers come to recognize that we are docs, but that is not the totality of our identities.
We are parents, children, siblings, friends, musicians, entrepreneurs, partiers, innovators, leaders, GOT enthusiasts…
So as much as possible, there will be no medical jargon, no expansive vocabulary, no pontification, no p-values… just opinions, conjecture and feelings.
Because we’re people too.
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