Now, I don't want to make it sound as if all doctors are miserable and should quit immediately.  For one thing, we need doctors (and nurses and support staff) available twenty-four hours per day, seven days per week because, obviously, medical things happen all the time!  Babies are not only born during business hours (as I know all too well), emergencies happen, patients need to be admitted to the hospital, questions need to be answered.  I will digress a moment here and point out that if it's 3am and you've had a cold for three days, you don't need to page your doctor.  THAT can wait until business hours.  You think I'm kidding?

Anyway, I want to be clear that I didn't just quit my career willy-nilly after spending twelve years and accruing hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to get here.  I don't have some magical trust fund or fairy godmother that's going to pay the bills until I figure things out.  I have very real debt and a very real mortgage.  My husband is an English teacher - I need to get a job!  I worked hard to save enough that I could have a cushion of time - a sabbatical, if you will - in which to decompress and figure out my next step.  I needed time to heal after ending what, to me, felt like an abusive relationship.

Here's where I'm going with this...  Lots of physicians are unhappy with their lives and careers, and would like to make a change.  Does that mean everyone should?  Of course not.  Sometimes all that's needed is a good hard look at one's working situation, and some creative ideas for how to improve it.  Can you  work fewer hours?  Job-share?  Simplify the paperwork?  Is there a way to keep the parts of the job you love and improve upon the parts you don't? 

In my case, I had to dive deep into myself and figure out whether I was where I was meant to be.  Was I just unhappy with the work hours, or was it something more profound?  I spent years soul-searching before finally admitting that the practice of medicine was making me unhappy.  Not just the hours, not just the responsibility for people's lives, not just the constant threat of the malpractice lawyer hovering in the background.  Those all played a role, to be sure, but I finally discovered (and admitted, a big step further than discovering) that I was meant to use my medical education, and the skills that got me to this highly-educated state, in a different way.  Once I knew this, and once I had admitted it out loud (like I said, two very different things), it was very hard to stay.  By the end, I was dreading every day.  Not that I didn't love certain aspects of my job, and not that I didn't love a lot of my patients,  but the price that I was paying was too high.

Quitting was not easy, but it was necessary.  Now comes the really hard part.  What's next?  Stay tuned...

Making a Leap...

So.... what do you do when you're a doctor and you quit being a doctor?  That's what I'm here to explore.  I was making myself physically sick and psychically miserable in my choice of careers.  Of course, there were parts of my job that I loved, but the benefits were not worth the price I was paying.  So here I am, paying my bills with a dwindling savings account, wondering what's next...