My husband and I bought a farm. Stay tuned for our new blog that will involve sheep, ducks, chickens, highland cattle and goats! Maybe I"ll quit medicine all together since the Ontario government doesn't think my time is really worth anything. Yeehaw!
It's been just over a year since we got our lovely pupp Nessa. She can be a right pain in the ass but has also brought smiles, laughter and variety to our lives. I'm glad every day that we rescued her and wish that our home was big enough to rescue all the poor dogs we see on facebook. Maybe next year Nessa will get a sibling!
One thing I don't talk about here is my competitive cycling. I have been racing cross country for 5 years or so now and I'm making the transition from XC short course to XC marathon racing. This seems to be a great thing for women to do as they get a bit older and the slow twitch fibers seem to be taking over the fast twitch like a slow marching army. My inspiration is Rebecca Rusch. She is an athlete to be worshiped in my opinion and was a late comer to the mountain biking world. That, however, did not stop her from excelling, winning the Leadville trail 100 several times, the 24h mtb world championships, and setting the solo record for the Kokopelli Trail.
After last year's mtb season I burned out. I stopped riding for a couple of months and did other things - running, hiking, curling, etc. This year I'm trying to qualify for the Leadville Trail 100 at the Wilmington 100. This is 100 km of mountain biking to qualify for 100 miles of mountain biking at 10,200 ft of altitude with climbing as high as 3000 feet. I'm scared about my ability to cope with elevation after my recent experience in Canmore when I did not cope with the altitude well. This has re-aligned my thinking on how long I need to be there prior the race to acclimate!
I'm getting my mojo back slowly. I started training again and now I'm slowly gaining momentum. I hope I get enough momentum by June to significantly improve on my Wilmington 100 time. I need to shave off about 30 minutes over 100km. I have 3 months to do it! Let's hope I can pull it together with my call schedules, office politics and dog responsibilities!
One day I went to the humane society just to have a look...
Most days I hope at least once during that day for:
1) the weekend to come faster
2) my patients not to show up
3) to be abducted by aliens away from my workplace
The other day my colleague and I were standing at the back door getting ready to leave on a Thursday and she commented that the next day was Friday and it's almost the weekend. I felt wistful and commented that I wish we didn't wish our lives away waiting for the next weekend to come around. I'm tired of wishing my life away. Does that mean I should change practices, careers, locations? I don't know. Maybe I just need to change my attitude.
And sometimes your day is great because you assisted in the OR all day and had absolutely no responsibility for the outcome. 1 retractor, 2 rectractor, 3 rectractor 4... I might quit my day job and just hang around the OR.
Sometimes the best thing that happens in your day is that your scary psychotic patient doesn't show up.
Why is it that different medical specialties AND doctors within the same medical specialty love to badmouth each other? He is a bad doctor because he didn't do this, she's a bad doctor because she didn't do that, surgery hates medicine, medicine hates surgery, everyone hates family medicine, psychiatrists are crazy. I have been guilty of this myself. But, you know what? We all do our best. We all have 24 hours in a day and spend at least 10 of them working, usually more. We worry about our patients when we go to bed at night, we try to do our best by them because we are responsible for them. Orthopedic surgeons ask you for help because they are busy worrying about the broken hip in the ER that they have to get to the OR and feel unsure about that insulin order, family medicine asks for your help with the Guillaine Barre syndrome because they feel uncomfortable sitting on them until a hospital with a neurologist deems the patient bad enough to take them, the internist, they didn't know the patient's fracture needed reducing when the ER doc had casted it. We all work together, we all need each other, let's pull together and stop bad mouthing each other.
Back from Italy, ate too many carbs, drank too much wine, had an amazing time. Feeling a bit jetlagged :) zzzz. Went in to the office today on my usual day off to work through all the messages. Found out that the person's license I took away before I left (she screamed at me for 5 minutes over the phone) came in and had a MOCA score of 1/30... for those non-medical types, that's really not good. I was dreading seeing this patient and am really glad she was seen when I was away by our superstar N.P.
One of our partners quit today so we'll be looking for fresh blood. Can't say I didn't see it coming.
All of my OB patients who acted up the week before I left started behaving themselves as soon as I was out of the country! score!
All in all, this 2 weeks off was a success. I'm still looking forward to going to the St. Paul's family med conference in Vancouver next month - another week off!
This week I took an extra day off in order to spend a long weekend biking in Allegheny park in NY/PA. I took ONE DAY and came home to 40 messages in my EMR inbox and a backlog of crap to deal with. My stress level shot up to 13/10. Maybe even 20/10. I felt like I never left. I hope my 2 week vacation doesn't end up this way.
I hate getting ready for vacation because it means:
1) doing more call in preparation for vacation so you can get the time off
2) making extensive handover notes on all OB patients just in case they crash and burn while I'm away
3) stressing about packing
4) worrying about crashing in a ball of fire and dying on the flight over
5) worrying that I'm going to forget something when packing
Over the past week my GI system has started seriously rebelling - painful gas one day, GERD, diarrhea. Each on their very own day and not at all related to what I have eaten (I think). I don't feel particularly stressed but I have started forgetting things and putting the milk in the cupboard, so maybe I'm just ignoring my stress better...
Our manager we hired has officially turned down the job after an informal acceptance. I almost cried. I have never really been speechless before... I was speechless. I went to bat for this woman and basically convinced quite a few of my colleagues to go for her and she let me down. I probably feel more gutted than I should, but I was really looking forward to finishing up with my "extra duties". I'm sick of this.
Thankfully, I haven't been sued yet.
I brought a proposal today to our physicians at our board of directors. The proposed plan would have simplified patient's lives and improved patient care and leveraged our already available services from allied health professionals. Why was it rejected? Money. Even though the numbers show that the majority of physicians would not lose any money. Normally I wouldn't take something like this so personally but today I was totally pissed off. Well, live and learn, try to do something good and you get shot down. Maybe I should just stop trying.
We finally hired a new manager. Hopefully this one will stick. She seems to have all of the great relevant skills and is very nice. Now to vomit all the things I have learned out of my brain and into hers! I am very excited to get these extra tasks off my plate.
I have been waking up in the middle of the night a lot lately, anxieties, fears, almost like going back to my first month in practice when I worried about everything and anything. I feel like I'm back in that headspace, like someone is suddenly going to figure out that I'm an imposter and I'm not worthy. Someone is going to find me out and sue me and my life will never be the same. I don't know if anyone else feels this way, but I do.
In other news, we are building a deck. Ben and I aren't very good at cooperating on things like this but thankfully there haven't been too many disagreements - just a few bickering sessions! The deck beams and joists are almost done, we're just waiting for some cement to dry and then we can start putting on the deck boards! I'm stoked to hang out and have a drink on the deck when we're done.
Our office seems to be in a constant state of flux. Managers retiring, new manager starting, managers sucking, managers leaving, interviewing new managers etc. etc. etc. In the absence of a manager the MDs have had to pick up the slack and act as an office manager. I must often have a look of panic on my face because my colleagues have told me I need some time off. I dream about full sharps boxes and paper shredding boxes and needing to discipline employees. I just was not trained for this and never wanted to do anything like this. Management is just not something I get any pleasure from. I also don't like change. Too much going on all at once.
Plus, I have a patient who came in to get copies of his xrays of an injury to "take to a lawyer" and now I wake up in a cold sweat afraid that I'm getting sued. I'm just waiting to be served papers. Ugh. I know I didn't do anything wrong, but that doesn't mean you don't get sued in this business...
I hope that you all, like me, are standing in support of Wendy Davis. She is standing for 12 hours in the Texas State Senate to filibuster the anti-abortion bill. You can watch her live here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=2Q8Hr0O20LY
