Aah. Today I got home at 6pm. There's a small pile of late discharge summaries on my desk (the things we send out to the GPs telling them all the terrible screw-ups we made in hospital) but I have a new registrar arriving tomorrow so I seized the opportunity to be slack and took off. My old registrar called me at about 5.45 asking me where I was and I was delighted to tell him that I was gone, all the patients were stable, and there were no new issues, goodbye and good luck.
I realized today that the suckiest thing about my job right now is not my job. I actually kind of enjoy my job. It's satisfying in that way that looking at a big pile of blood clots that someone has just pooped out can be.
No, the suckiest thing about my job is that when I get home it takes me about 4 hours to unwind. I can't stop replaying the day in my head, wondering if I did this or that right, wondering what I forgot to do, trying to remember the detail of some x-ray or sputum culture in case I get asked about it the next day, trying to make sense of what's happening to me via the medium of sick people. It makes me so tense that I lose my appetite and can't eat dinner, and I find talking to my Smaller Half and the Hatchling really hard.
I can usually stop this just before I go to bed. Then I sleep (or not) and wake up tense again because I know that I have to go in for the ward round, which always brings a new shovel full of surprises. So I can't eat breakfast much because I'm freaking out again. As for lunch - ha! The El Dorado of meals. Much discussed, never seen.
I'm pretty sure that I've already lost about 5kg, especially when you factor in the brutal gastro that I caught in the first week on the ward.
So basically what I'm saying is that I've developed some kind of panic disorder precipitated by work. From what I can gather, everyone does in this business when they first start. It's just that people don't admit it.
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