F2 doctor feeling optimistic about the future..

Something happened recently that has changed my outlook. I have written about it on my blog: So I’ve been thinking, lots. Most of my blog is endless ranting and whinging about how awful life is as a doctor, and it’s true, it can be pretty shit. But take the recent picture of the A+E doctor grieving for a 19 yr old patient that died, it went viral and everyone suddenly seemed to empathise and appreciate what we have to go through as doctors. Death becomes so normal for us, upset, stress, grief, these all become normal parts of our day and we let them consume us, but to the point that we don’t realise what’s happening to us. We brush these emotions off so that we can move on to the next patient. We don’t look after ourselves. Depression and anxiety are rife amongst the medical profession. But we brush it aside, don’t take time to accept that maybe something mentally is happening to us as a result of the constant influx of extreme emotions we have to endure. That mixed with exhaustion and very little time to do things for ourselves, it’s a very dangerous combination. It would be way too much for the normal population to handle, this viral image proved that with the 100s of thousands of comments stating that they don’t know how we do it, yet we do do it, not even realising we are doing it, and we do it most days of our working lives. I have recently accepted defeat. It happened unexpectedly..... read the rest at Disenchanted Medic :)
Source: New Media Medicine - Category: Universities & Medical Training Authors: Tags: Weblogs Source Type: forums