I’m a doctor and I’m living with my parents
(Building a website is both fun and frustrating, I miss the good old days of angelfire…if you don’t know what that is then you’re probably young enough to be my son or daughter, shudder the thought)
I finally started packing my flat last weekend. I had been putting it off since I found an estate agent to lease my flat out. It’s so odd seeing my life packed away in a few small boxes.
I had told myself that it was going to be easy to move out. I already spend so much time with my parents anyway after my friend’s mother passed away which triggered all manner of anxieties in the last year. I was frustrated with having half of my stuff at my parents and half at mine. I was wasting money on heating and electricity if I am only there for a few weeks a month.
But boy did I cry when I looked at my empty room devoid of all the character which I had brought to it over the past few years after I had packed it up.
Why on earth was I moving out? I can afford to live here, the mortgage has decades on it. I just need to work more sessions or do a few more locum posts to cover it each month.
That was the problem.
Forget about the rubbish contract the government has imposed on practices nationwide yearly meaning practices who are also dealing with every increasing costs just can’t afford to hire locums. Forget about how the ARRS scheme has reduced demand for locum GPs even more. Forget about how partnerships and salaried jobs just aren’t attractive enough for GPs to really take the plunge and commit.
I also just did not want to work that much at all this year.
The best way I can describe it is that the more sessions I work, the amount of other work generated which does not get accounted for increases. And it’s not linear the amount, it often felt more akin to a logarithmic scale. The mental exhaustion certainly felt logarithmic.
Without meaning to sound dramatic but coming from a doctor practicing for the past 10 years, I can honestly say this:
GP is the hardest f***ing job I have ever done.
I knew from my first GP placement in ST1 (the first year of specialty training) I had to go less than full time training in ST3 where I would be in GP for a whole year. Otherwise I would have a stroke.
So whilst I could try and find some salaried posts, I would be tied down to doing potentially a number of sessions which I am not comfortable doing, only to take more work home and then leaving me with no time to do figure out where I want to go with my career because I would just be too damn exhausted to think.
I don’t want to live my life like a zombie forever, being a slave to work on the off chance I might end up unemployed. (link GPonline article)
So considering that I am in a career flux, and I have to be sensible about my expenses to pay, I realized that sacrifices must be made and that came in the shape of my flat. My flat represented so much more than just a sanctuary for me. It marked a point in my life where I felt like I had made it to adulthood, whatever that meant.
So it felt like a step backwards
But after I was done packing my car up, I decided to try and reframe it in my mind. What if this was actually a massive step forward? A hero’s journey is not without it’s troughs and this was mine.
What if my whole stepping into adulthood is me actually taking responsibility for my choices in life for once, rather than continuing down the conveyor belt blindly as I had been doing so for years?
That sounds a lot better right?
