The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Thank you. But I don't think this rotation is likely to get much better, and I say this while fully acknowledging the possibility that depression and fatigue is coloring my judgement.
You have to understand that I'm surrounded by other, competent doctors. Some of them scarily so. They don't get the breaks very often either, barring the "mandatory" lunch break half of them eat at their desk.
I hope I get faster and more efficient. I'm touched by your faith in me. The workload still seems daunting. Oh well, it's 5 months. I've done a full year of about-as-bad, and that only made me so depressed I seriously contemplated quitting medicine. Right now, I'm older, wiser, and better acquainted with antidepressant guidelines. Getting better medicated is my best bet for making this bearable. I am pursuing it like my career depends on it, which it may well do.
It's impossible to have a good version of this talk in this setting, but I will try - usually (but not always, I'm not there, I don't know what you are struggling with) the problem for early phase trainees is excess cognitive load associated with stuff that should be "free." Writing notes shouldn't usually require thinking, it should only require time. Basic interviews will be effortless. Physical exam (oh wait psych lol)...
Later the difficulty will be true medical decision making in complicated cases, advanced level exam and interview, and leadership and administrative tasks. These have higher ceilings.
For now you are probably finding it painful to do basic things. I mean yeah, that is what training is for. Most of the work is those basic things though, and as you do them more often you will find them easier, they will be automatic. Even sitting at your desk working is less exhausting if dictating or typing your note is automatic and not an onerous process as you remember how to accurately describe such and such thing.
Example - as you start getting more experience you'll notice how remembering everything for the patient encounter gets easier. This is not because you are gaining memory kung-fu, it is because your brain is automatically knowing what is important and pertinent and what is default.
This process will happen as time goes on, but with some mindfulness you can accelerate it - or if that's hard you can just ride the wave and know it will happen.
It's happened before for every trainee and it will happen to you.
One of my favorite processes in medical education is watching textbook driven people go "you aren't teaching me" and then gradually realizing that the work is the teaching and that they learned the textbook without needing to sit down and do that bullshit.
It comes. It's hard and you have to do it, but the knowledge and skills come.
Then things get easier.
*Above advice not valid for procedural skills.
Thank you. There is a lot of context I haven't shared, and probably won't share, even in private (with anyone, not you, you'd be more likely to know than most).
That's not the biggest problem I have. I'm happy to write proper psychiatric notes. I write essays on the internet for fun, and that's more intellectually taxing.
You'd be unpleasantly surprised. I definitely was. Psychiatry works very differently here. As a trainee at my level, I do a lot of medical management of physical illness, and I don't like it one bit. This will only change when I become a registrar. I'm not sure what the threshold for "call medicine and ask them to manage this" is in the US, but it's much higher here. That's what's really killed me in the past. [More highly relevant information that I am studiously omitting.]
An early trainee is a glorified ward donkey. All I can do is bray and scratch my ass.
I agree that things will get better later, with time and experience. You know why my last placement sucked. This one sucks for entirely different reasons. Mostly the drastically higher workload. It should get better, once I push through the next 5 months, which I intend to. I worked very hard to get here, I have nowhere better to go, and I do sincerely believe things will get better eventually. I still appreciate the support.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link