As usual, my journal entry is situated around a run of night shifts. This is for two reasons really; one is because night shifts/on-calls in general are both eventful and exhausting. The second is because I have a lot of them. So I can’t really remember a remarkable normal working day unless it’s in theatre or in clinic (a rarity).
Nevertheless, I started this week jet lagged and miserable. I think social media generates a fallacy, whereby we are indoctrinated to believe life is rosy, that we should love every second of our job, be a multimillionaire and also be in Mr/Miss Olympia shape. When we feel the counter opposite to this, it’s easy to feel ashamed, as though it’s our inability to cope that’s the driving factor. So, is it ok to not be ok?
The straightforward answer is, yes, of course it’s ok to not be ok! Fortunately, we exist in a fairly dynamic society, where societal opinion of mental wellness has improved significantly over recent years. There is an inherent understanding that we are fallible human beings, with hopes, dreams, and fears. Yet, paradoxically, it can be a challenge to express this fallibility in the medical profession. Just search #medtwitter to see a prime example. Thousands upon thousands of daily tweets screaming success and accomplishment. I avoid the platform like the plague for this very reason.
Anyway, I digress. Going back to the original point, I felt awful this morning. It felt as though someone had dimmed the brightness of life, shifted the colour scheme to greyscale and desaturated the world around me. I wanted more sleep. I wanted to exercise, feel like my physical health was in my hands again rather than this tired, myalgic and arthralgic state. I wanted more time to be at home, to do menial chores around the house, maybe attempt to finally sort the garden out. I wanted more time with my partner, not doing anything, just reconnecting. I hadn’t seen her all week. Meditation helped to gently nudge my mindset in the right direction, but the effort to generate positivity felt sisyphean. Ordinarily, a scheduled day in theatre would have been the highlight of my week. Having said that, I can’t imagine how I would have felt if today had not been a theatre day. Worse? Most probably.
As the day progressed, the feeling ebbed. I scrubbed into a quadriceps tendon repair, which was good fun. I felt like a competent assistant. There were other cases on the trauma list to look forward to as well. I’d made some cheese, beetroot and rocket salad sandwiches in the morning and had looked forward to eating them all day. They tasted pretty good, just as I’d hoped. “Look forward to”: semantically indicative of some positive energy discreetly infiltrating my day.
I drove home in the sun after a productive day in the operating theatre, concluding with a rewardingly confident completion of the majority of a Dynamic Hip Screw (DHS) operation by myself. I gave myself a proverbial pat on the back; today wasn’t so bad after all.
So, as regards the moral of the story, I think it’s important to be real and candid about these things. Not every day is hunky dory in Core Surgical Training. Following a run of nights, which follow on directly from 2 weeks of day on calls, it’s natural to feel this tired and disincentivised. But it’s the small things that can bring us back up to the surface. A small joke in theatre, a kind comment from a member of the theatre team.
Slowly, but surely, the corners of the mouth start to curl upwards again…
Vasudev Zaver 