Why I Took A Break From Normal Doctoring
Normal doctoring has really changed a lot and there are a lot of things that I think are wrong and aren't helping out who healthcare is meant to help out - the patients. For me and why I left, was time. There are some articles that mentioned the normal doctor has a panel of about 2,500 patients. Those are their patients - the ones that they're responsible for, the ones that they answer messages for and should be scheduled with, if at all possible, and those sorts of things. That's your doctor. It's been estimated that in order to take care of 2,500 patients a doctor would need 21.7 hours in a day. And for me, that just wasn't manageable if I also wanted to see my kids and see my husband and do other things with my life. But also if I wanted to do things like sleep and eat and, you know, the necessary things. Especially as a family doctor - my goal, my focus, my purpose is preventive care. How to keep people healthy, how to keep them from getting sick. If I can't do any of those things for myself then I'm not who they want to listen to and who they’ll believe and who they'll trust when I say that you need time for sleep and you need time for exercise and you need time to pick good foods for yourself and for your family. And you need rest time. You need time to do nothing. That was it for me - time. I tried what I could; I went to my bosses and I said, “Listen, this is too much. I’m taking home too much work.” And essentially their response was always, “Well, we don’t think so. So we’re not going to change anything.”
The other thing that I was really struggling with is that, in healthcare, we can't fall behind. Because if we fall behind, it's not just deadlines get moved and projects get finished later. It's people don't get taken care of. The more you fall behind, the riskier it is that you miss things like critical lab results. You miss a message from a patient or you can't get to it soon enough - someone who says that they're in pain and they need pain meds now. Or they can't figure out what's wrong with them but they've had a fever for 3 days. Those sorts of things can’t wait.
The decision for me, really, was that at some point I am going to get so burnt out from trying to keep up with everything and never having enough time, that I won't be a good doctor anymore. Those are the ones where patients start complaining, “Oh, they never listen to me. They never have time for me. They shoo me out the door as soon as they can. I can only talk about one problem. I feel like they never listen.” And that's never who I wanted to be.
The really scary part is that once you get to a point where you're so burnt out, you lose… it becomes really hard to be empathetic. I think a really good example is from the book When Breath Becomes Air. It's written by a surgeon who got cancer and started seeing things from the other side and wrote a book about it. It's really, really great. There's this one section where he talks about his friend from med school or residency, I can’t remember which one. But it was her job to scrub in for a whipple, which is a surgery to help with pancreatic cancer. It's a very very long surgery - several hours long. His friend got to a point where she was just so tired, so tired that she wished that the patient they were getting ready to do the whipple on had met(astasi)s which would mean that the cancer was so far along that the surgery just wouldn't help. So they wouldn’t do the surgery.
I didn't want to get to the point of burning out where I was wishing bad things on my patients because it would mean it would be easier for me.
So that's why. That's why I stopped. And I haven't decided if I’ve stopped forever or anything like that at all, but I'm looking for something with more balance. I'm looking for something where I can fully have the time to take care of patients the way that they are supposed to be taken care of. But I also have time to take care of me and my family and my two kids who need me.
