Who knows if this physio stuff is working. 4 weeks until my 100km off road/on road race and 4 hour ride today. verdict was: my back hurt. Is it any better? Probably not. Am I going to do 4h of singletrack on race day? no. I think there's probably 2 km of singletrack in the whole race. I need to start just road biking on my mtb.
I tried not to tell the physiotherapist that I was a doctor because often that colours your interactions with other healthcare professionals and not always in a positive way. Unfortunately, I had to put my occupation on the survey. This lead to the very annoying question of "what do you think is going on"? if I knew what was wrong, I would have fixed it myself! Of course, when I told him, he agreed. Hrm.
Why is it that I can't seem to take my own advice? I've been suffering through horrible back pain every time I ride my bike for about a year now. I remember that last year's 8 hour race turned into a 4 hour because my back hurt so much. Fast forward, this year's 8 hour is in a week, today's 3 hour ride had to be cut short at 2 hours because of... wait for it... cripple back pain! I really should have gone to a physiotherapist (which is what I would have told my patients) a year ago. Why didn't I go? I'm cheap. I have no coverage and physio is expensive. Yes, I can afford it but would prefer if the pain just went away on its own, but it hasn't, so tomorrow I'm calling for a physiotherapy assessment. A year of pain is enough I think! Hopefully I can get one organized pretty quickly and have it during my day off so I don't have to take any time away from work and cause patient and receptionist anger.
I was actually doing really well in independent practice and what has broken me and continues to break down my self confidence little by little is hospital patient care. My family medicine group does "hospital rounds" where basically one of the 7 of us looks after the practice's hospitalized patients each week. I hate it. I have been on hospital rounds for the last 3 weeks. 2 weeks of "mentored" time and this week on my own. I find it so stressful I really want to quit my job to not have to go back. Seriously. The worst thing is getting the 7-8am phonecall that someone has been admitted to your service. Now you have to go in and try to see all the patients PLUS do an admission in the 3-4 hours you have before having to go back to the office to see afternoon patients. Today my admission was a shit show. Not what was handed over, way more complex, a story that didn't add up, way outside my scope. I spent all day struggling with this patient and finally asked for an internal medicine consult from the run of his feet internist because it all just didn't add up. HOpefully he sees him this evening in the midst of his 100 other things he had to do. I am not an internist. I wasn't trained to be one. My internal medicine rotations were mostly spent trying to discharge patient who were admitted for failure to cope. I'm not sure how much I actually learned. I hate this.
I may look like I'm waiving very enthusiastically at you all while I'm swimming in the sea of independent practice but I'm actually drowning and trying as hard as I can to keep my head above the water. I am burned out, tired, have compassion fatigue, feel lost, feel like I am/should still be a resident, feel overwhelmed, feel like I'm the first person and the last person to ever feel like this. I am neglecting my family, my friends, my exercise, my race training, my sanity. I'm regretting becoming a doctor. Working at anything else seems so much more appealing right now.
Excuse my tantrum. I'm going to bed now.
