Wow, it’s been a while!
Well, I’m no longer in residency but I am still floating around. I finished chief year last year and started a new position in a new city (still in the US, still on the east coast). I’m in a non-ACGME fellowship which means I’m always confusing people if I’m a trainee or an attending (I myself am confused). This position has had lots of ups and downs, but with the semi-spring brewing outside, lately it has felt like more ups. It has given me a chance to travel to and work in a part of the States that I had never experienced before (the Great Plains) and maybe I’ll write about that a little here some day.
Part of the ups and downs of my new position (still new? I started it 10 months ago) is how different my schedule is. Residency was a non-stop blur where I was either working or sleeping. Chief year gave me weekends back (mostly) and more normal working hours, which was appreciated. Fellowship, at least this fellowship, has been a mix of intense balls to wall clinical work for a few weeks at a time, interspersed with days of unstructured time to work on “projects”. It’s like a strange mash-up of grad school and crazy clinic days.
They say that stress levels increase even when people go on vacation because it’s the change in pace that gets us internally riled up. I think that the unstructured time, after a few days, has riled up my anxieties because of how easy it makes it to procrastinate which leads to feeling unproductive which leads to those annoying existential crisis moments of what am I doing why am I doing this why am I even here?!
This is an expensive city and settling into a wooden chair in a coffee shop with a $4 drink that I could make at home for cents doesn’t make sense all the time but the alternative of staying cloistered at home seems to make everything described in the above paragraph worse. It kind of makes sense now why I’ve restarted this blog, hmm? (There is the third alternative of your lovely local public library, which I have recently discovered and praise everything that they allow drinks!)
Anyhoo, I’m glad this blog is still around to plop in a few words sometimes. Hope to keep writing more. If not, see you again in 4 years! : )
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