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:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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An interesting observation: colors are literally brighter when you're not depressed. I can't stress enough the fact that this is not a metaphor. They're more saturated, and every now and then, I stop to look at the porcelain sky or a particular nice shop sign. I've even admired traffic lights. I think I'm as euthymic as I've ever been, and stress levels are, well, non-zero, but at a local minimum.
I have mixed feelings about the fact that I recently, over dinner, found out that most of my junior colleagues are older than me. An artifact of Scotland encouraging graduate entry medicine. I suppose that's a reminder that even after several years grinding exams to get here, I'm making excellent time.
And then a med student with grey hair and a look of deep despondence said he was surprised to learn that he was a few months older than me. He said he'd thought I was in my early thirties. I shrugged, and said that was one way to find out I looked decrepit. I asked him how he felt about likely becoming a consultant in his 40s, which, to be fair, isn't that late by British standards. He said he was trying not to think about. Poor guy had applied for medicine multiple times; he'd done well enough on the exams, but failed the personality screens/interviews. He was bad at even faking the extroversion. A real shame, I explained that medicine strongly selected for the Type A-s, but the rest of us could make it anyway. I told him the important thing was that he was here now.
And then I explained that I felt that grey hair or a bit of the Norwood was an asset for male doctors. Engenders confidence. Implies we know what we're doing. This is perhaps a mild amount of cope, but I retain all my hair anyway. That comes as a surprise given what I've been through.
And a little while earlier, my boss had implied that he pegged my age around 21. That would explain quite a bit about his attitude towards me. I wish that were true.
Then there was the time I snuck into a clinical skills session meant for fresh interns. I hadn't done an ABG in four years, and I have a slightly irrational fear that it'll be expected of me. Even though I work in a specialty where we literally don't keep the equipment around. It's early days, and everyone is getting to know each other at that hospital. I was asked by someone how I felt about starting my internship. I said that I was rather glad it was long over, and that I had no business being here, but they weren't checking the guest list closely. They were amused, and asked me if I was trying to blend in. I looked down at the rather different shade of lanyard, and my dress shirt and nice shoes amidst a sea of scrubs, and said that I wasn't doing very well. At least I got the ABG done first try.
Sticking to the theme: a youthful intern was rizzing up the med students. One of the ladies was Australian, and thus subject to cross-cultural discourse about Kangaroo Jack and Crocodile Dundee. Look man, it's that or Drop Bears. The intern said that these were childhood artifacts from "our generation" - and the young lady couldn't be expected to know about them - while gesturing at me. At me. As the reference generation.
I couldn't let this stand. Every now and then he says something that makes me me want to crawl into a coffin, call me an anti-pedophile the way I'm out of touch with the youth. Nice kid, nonetheless. He'll eventually live down the jokes from one of the blood cultures he'd taken off a patient coming back positive for Lactobacillus salivarius - a commensal/symbiotic organism that, as the name strongly implies, is supposed to stay in the saliva. Getting to show off in front of the med students is just about the only perk of the intern years. Well behind me, but at least I can admire public infrastructure instead. It's been a green light for the first time in years.
Tangentially related, but once on my EMT-B rotations at 21, I had a Chinese guy assume that I was a fucking resident, because I was a man wearing scrubs on the L&D floor, who was clearly too young to be an attending. I was not a mature looking 21 year old. I didn't stop getting carded until like 30. A few weeks earlier on an ER rotation an elderly black lady had asked how young they were starting us these days, because she couldn't believe I was working in a hospital when I looked like a high school freshman.
Anyway, the nurses had a great laugh about that and I believe the poor intern? was given shit about it for several weeks.
Also I was wearing big stompy boots with my borrowed scrubs, and he apparently just didn't notice those.
I resist the siren call of scrubs. Comfy? Yes. Practical? Yes to the yes, given the exposure to bodily fluids. But that only makes wearing white dress shirts to work even more of a standout.
I heard a senior female consultant commiserating with the junior girls about how she still gets mistaken for a nurse all the time. I told them that I get mistaken for a doctor most days of the week, and I've stopped correcting people.
Then again, I haven't been carded since I was sixteen.
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