Being Me

After my little moan earlier in the week I am feeling considerably cheerier now. Firstly some time in the sunshine, seeing how incredible my city is looking right now has done me the world of good. The anticipation of spring is pretty much my favourite emotion in the world.

Plus I think I may have come to a bit of a realisation.

I have spent quite a lot of time blaming myself for going off sick. I have kept thinking if I was more like so and so then it wouldn’t have happened. If I cared less about my career like them, then I’d have been ok. If I stopped caring what other people thought, then I wouldn’t have such unrealistic expectations for myself. If I hadn’t listened to them going on about goals and achieving, then I’d have kept plodding along happily and not burnt out. If I’d had more hobbies outside work then it wouldn’t have mattered so much.

But I think I may have decided that the person I need to be more like, actually, is ME. Maybe I should accept that actually I love my job, and I want to be really good at it, and I want others to think that I’m really good at it, and I am ambitious, and it does matter, and I do care, and that’s ok. That it’s ok not to want to just show up for my shifts and do the bare minimum and then go, and not think about work again until the next shift.

Obviously, it’s not like everything was perfect before I went off sick. I do absolutely need to work on pacing myself, looking after myself, resting. I need to find a balance between work and home, even if that is something that I need to constantly adjust. I do absolutely need to get better at saying no, at switching off, at maintaining my boundaries. But today at least I think that it is possible to do all of that and still be me, a person who wants to be a damn good doctor.

So, I kind of feel like I have found my direction again. I am not going to let my wobble scare me into thinking that I cannot ever become a consultant. I feel like I know what direction I’m heading in again, just that I can try walking a little slower this time. Who knows, maybe taking the occasional moment to appreciate my current view. And bloody hell, it was looking like a rather gorgeous one as I was walking in to town yesterday!

Progress report

I’ve been quiet on here, I know. I’m kind of finding it hard to know what to say now that I’m back at work. I feel like I can’t come on here and talk about how it’s going, because if I’m back at work, it needs to all be going well. I need to be super professional, super confident, doctor woman who can take it all in her stride.

The truth is it’s been a really tough week, which, even though it’s only Wednesday evening, is over for me now, because after four tough shifts I now have a few days off, hooray!

This week I’ve got to some pretty scary low points if I’m honest, and I may have cried more in the past five days than I have the entire last six months. I am so desperate to stay at work though, so I have been incredibly lucky that I have had some amazing support to make it possible for me to keep working in a way that I feel is manageable right now.

I realise that people who work with me may be surprised to read it’s been a bad week. I spend so much of my time smiling and laughing and getting on with it. Because I feel like that’s what I have to do. But then I think that maybe people won’t be able to believe me when I say that I’m having a hard time. I came across this on the old Instagram this week, and I think it sums up perfectly how the last five days have felt:

But, I am making steps forward, every bloody shift I’m making some step forward, and I’m hopeful now that I have the support in place to keep on doing that. I guess I just wanted to share, in case anyone else is having a tough time and thinking that everyone else is doing great. I bet I’m not the only person who is putting on that face that everything is just great, and then going off for a cry in the loos.

The next step

So the pathway back to work is a wobbly one. I am finding it hard to know the right place to put my feet. I think the hardest thing is that my colleagues, who have known me all these years, they look at me and see the person they have always known. The one who can take it in her stride, the one who knows what she’s doing. Whilst most of them know about my sick leave, they still see the old person in front of them. And I completely get it because more than anything I want to be that person. I do everything I can to look like her, sound like her. I smile and nod and say yes, fine, ok.

And occasionally I have moments where I am, moments where it all flows and I know what I’m doing, the fibres of my muscles and the neurons of my brain can just do it and it feels wonderful. And then I get scared and that flow vanishes and everything feels so hard again.

I know that really that person is still there. If you take away work, I am still there. I still love the same things, laugh myself silly at my husband’s dry jokes, feel pure joy singing to my favourite songs in the shower (I have currently found untold levels of wonder at the back catalogue of The Proclaimers, an unexpected event, but I swear it is true love).

It’s just that when I am work I have become a small, scared person. A person who wants to run away when asked to do something. Pretty much anything. Today somebody nonchalantly handed me a blood gas result to sign, and it felt like I was being handed a tiny bomb with a smile. The sense of risk, of making a mistake, of getting it wrong, of the consequences of that, feel utterly overwhelming. The sense of a system which is stretched beyond breaking point, where more and more and more of those little bombs of possible consequence are laiden onto the conscience of the staff, with such little consideration. And there is no end in sight. No understanding that this is a horrible blip which everybody is working hard to correct. This is how Emergency Medicine is going to be now. This is how the NHS is going to be. Get over it.

People keep telling me that I’ll get back to the old me, and to a large extent I believe them. It’s just hard to see that wobbly path ahead of me and be sure of quite where it’s heading. The only thing I know is that I just need to keep putting the next foot down somehow.