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.
No email address required.
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Men are largely far more stoic than women, it's a stereotype because it's true.
I pride myself on being quite stoic myself, not that the thought of my family or my dogs passing away doesn't fill me with premature grief. Well, at least it helps me make the most of our time together, until we can finally banish aging and death to the same hell as smallpox.
Much like you, if it's a person I'm not particularly familiar with, it doesn't bother me all that much, and that's a good thing, a surfeit of empathy is a liability for doctors, and we usually learn to compartmentalize pretty quick.
I've only cried once for a "patient", I had never met the man before, and he was already dead and cooling by the time I discovered him on my morning ward round, left to slowly decay on a floor with the flies and cockroaches. It was only the wailing of his daughter when I broke the news that made me cry, and I was fundamentally unsupported by anyone, including my colleagues or seniors, and while that rankled at the time, I've never cried for a patient since, even if I've pitied many.
Death is terrible, but since my day job is preventing it as long as possible, I can't say I'm not helping, and weeping and wailing doesn't by itself. At least nobody I really love has passed away since my grandma two decades back, and even then I was too young to really process things. I think I'm going to breakdown if my elderly German Shepherd passes, as much as I don't give a shit about the rights of animals, dogs have a soft spot in my heart, especially my own.
Medicine in America seems to work a little differently; when tough shit goes down people are at least a little supportive. This goes
doubletriplequadruple on the pediatric oncology unit.I think it would have been different if I was a girl, not that I can tell for sure! Then again, that would have made my life hell if I was one under the sadistic female gyne postgrad trainees lol. Couldn't find a bigger assortment of bitches at the Kennel Club..
At any rate, I'm only slightly bitter about it, they told me to toughen up, and toughen up I did. Not to mention I was responsible for a COVID ICU during the height of the pandemic here, watching people die slow painful deaths is only troubling in passing unless it's someone I love.
Tears are no substitute for normal saline.
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