In Fairness

While talking to the other half it struck me that no, it wasn't always like this. Being a doctor wasn't always rough - I enjoyed my housemanship.

Pause. Crickets chirping, and somewhere in the background the sound of locally-trained claws coming unsheathed.

Sure, I did my housemanship overseas where everyone's a wimp and nobody there works as hard as we do here, etcetcetc, people actually go out and drink on wednesday evenings and show up bleary eyed the next day for work, shock horror.

And horror of horrors we started work at 8.30 am, long after sunrise (especially in summer when the sun came up at four).

No horror stories there of people trudging to work at 6 am and leaving at 9-10 pm, sometimes midnight. No whinging about the tedium of running around ad nauseum arranging scans and taking bloods etcetc.

The thing is, we did work till late - not every day perhaps, but often enough. I remember well still being on the wards at 8.30 pm and bumping into my urology sister Cid who was also working past her hours and laughing about it. I remember how the other housemen used to be there too, and when the NHS started enforcing the calman act how we used to change into civvies and go on working.

There was something different about the feel of it all; we did it for our patients, whom we knew well and actually gave a damn about, and for the sense of cameraderie we felt for each other. We were happy.

It's the whole rat in an electrified cage thingie; the houserats here are trapped against their will receiving electric shocks unpredictably. Depression sets in.

We dictated our own suffering, we opted when to suffer and when not to, and we justified our pain in our heads as sacrifice, for other people so they wouldn't have to hurt so much.

I was happy as an SHO too, working crazy shifts that had me walking home in the wee hours past frozen lakes and leaving footprints in the snow. Same story.

The truth is being a doctor isn't all doom and gloom, and it isn't all drudgery and tedium.

I watch my housemen constantly losing their struggle day to day, and I watch myself occasionally berating them for not getting things done quickly enough, and I can't help but think maybe it doesn't have to be like this... Maybe there's some way to fix this mess. Maybe we could start work a little later, maybe enforce laws to restrict doctors' working hours -- transforming overtime into an act of volunteerism and selflessness. Maybe we'd be surprised at how good we really can be, at heart... instead of dictating that anyone failing to make the cut as a tireless mule is a "failure". But as each day passes yesteryear fades in memory and I begin to forget the way it used to be...

I'm still happy being a doctor, from time to time. I love stitching little things together, and I love being senselessly irradiated as I twiddle some wire down a long, narrow tube. But there's the crux - "from time to time".

In fairness, maybe it's possible to float through medicine on goodwill, selflessness and happy thoughts -- just not here, not now.