To Market To Market...

Wow, it has been 3 months since I've posted anything!  I guess you can tell that I've gotten busy with editing work.  That's both good and bad...  I am working like crazy, which is good, but I'm working like crazy, which is bad!  Working 7 days a week is a bit tiring, and it has left me no time to blog, work on my book, or do anything creative!  Luckily, I will hopefully soon be able to ease up on the work-a-thon...  I have just returned from the American Medical Writers Association annual conference and learned a thing or two about marketing myself, and finding clients that will pay me what I'm worth!  I wrote the following right after (okay, maybe parts of it during) my marketing seminar:

I have never been comfortable promoting myself.  When I was in medical school, I would describe myself as "just" a medical student.  That "just" seemed to take some responsibility off my shoulders, and it allowed me to keep telling myself the story that I was worth less than other people.  Once I was a physician, in residency and beyond, you really had to pry it out of me that I had MD after my name.  If someone asked me where I worked, I would reply, "in a hospital," which was usually followed by the question, "oh, are you a nurse?"  and the questioner's embarrassed justification when I finally revealed, "no, actually, I'm a physician."  Part of me took a perverse pleasure in exposing the inherent sexism in the question, and part of me cringed at being "exposed" as a doctor (see, Why Doctors Suck).  I always wanted to distance myself from the stereotype of physicians as arrogant, entitled jackasses, and part of me was reluctant to claim the credit for years of hard work and financial, personal, and emotional sacrifice. I didn't want to be perceived as "bragging" or to have an inflated sense of my own worth, but I went too far in the other direction, downplaying my intelligence, drive, persistence, and personal value.

I am currently at a conference of medical writers and editors, where I attended a workshop on marketing.  This is basically anathema to a person who grew up downplaying her abilities and achievements.  It has taken me a long time to learn that there is a big difference between "bragging" and owning my own worth, both as a highly educated individual who deserves recognition and compensation for her hard work, and as a human being who deserves love and happiness.  I had to learn the difference between confidence and arrogance, and that it was okay to be confident.  Nobody was going to smack me down for pretending to be being so great.  Now, I have to learn how to present myself and my services in a way that will make people want to hire me. Hard to do when you approach every situation assuming that they won't.

Let's practice a little....  People will want to hire me.  People will want to hang out with me, even though I may think I'm boring and dull, with nothing to say.  Okay, hang on...  despite this negative self-talk creeping in, I do have people in my life that like me, love me, and even people who want to spend time with me and to hear what I have to say.

My marketing instructor made a comment that I am SO SICK of hearing, but also that I probably need to keep hearing.  I complained that I am working for companies that don't pay very well, certainly for someone with an advanced degree.  He told me that these companies will only pay me low rates if I let them.  Grrr...  I get so frustrated, because if I'm not working for these companies (who were willing to take a chance on an inexperienced editor), then I'm not working, and I'm out on the street because I can't pay my mortgage.  The people who make comments like, "they'll only pay you those rates if you let them!" don't seem to take into account that this may have been (or seemed like) the only option at the time, and crappy pay is better than no pay.

But I do recognize that I need to step back from that personal, emotional response and hear what people are actually trying to say (sorry, instructor, for bursting into tears at the break).  You are worth more than this.  Your degree and your experience are worth more than this.  Your personality, your soul, your self is worth something.  To quote The Help, "I is smart, I is special, I is loved."

And that is worth something.

Promoting myself as someone people will want to hire, and to pay well, is a challenge.  It requires not selling myself short.   How's this for an editing and self-promotion slogan:

I'm here!  I'm clear!  Get used to it!

How are your dangling participles doing?

When I left my physician career behind, I wasn't really sure where I'd end up. 

Well, to be honest, I kind of had an idea (a type A uber-planner doesn't just leave behind her career without at least a wisp of a plan, as hard as she tries to "let go" and not have a plan). I had joined the American Medical Writer's Association (AMWA) and registered for their annual conference - conveniently, taking place just a couple weeks after my last day at the hospital.  I had an idea in my head that, after some time off to decompress and veg on the couch, I would make a foray into medical writing.  This is a vast and diverse field, with plenty of niches within it - I pictured myself getting involved in continuing medical education (CME) and writing articles for other physicians to read. They say to write what you know, no?

I went to the conference and immediately discovered two things.  One, writers are much more supportive of each other than physicians are.  Two, I really need to brush up on grammar.  Knowing what "sounds right" isn't going to cut it.  Okay, three things.  Three, I like grammar!

I returned home and duly fulfilled my destiny of vegging on the couch for a good while.  For a time, I was worried that I would never be motivated to go back to work, as I really enjoyed the couch-vegging lifestyle.  A lot.  My day was divided between classes at the gym and Netflixed TV shows.  I kinda loved it.  But eventually, I did start to get that niggling feeling that I should be doing something, well, productive with my life. And I started to look for jobs writing CME.

This was not as straightforward as it may sound, as I really wanted to try for a telecommuting position.  After more than a decade on the end of a pager, setting my own schedule and working from home sounded awfully nice. I did find a CME company willing to pay me to write an article, so I dove in.  And realized that I hated it.  Writing this blog and writing my experiences into a book are an entirely different animal than writing a scientific article.  The former flows out of me; the latter is like pulling teeth. I also did not like the feeling that I was writing a gigantic term paper that would be judged not only by my professor, but also by any physician who might read this article for their education. It had to be perfect, and I had had about enough of demanded-perfection in my old career.

In continuing to haunt the job boards of AMWA and websites dedicated to telecommuting, I found myself applying for (and getting!) editing jobs.  Non-native English speakers do a lot of the research in this world, and they want to publish their papers in the English journals.  That's where I come in!  I take my newfound love of grammar and mix it up with some study of the American Medical Association guidelines for scientific journals, and it all bakes up into a career as a freelance editor!  And, wonder of wonders, I love it!  I get to correct people's grammar (always fun), and I get to learn about something different every day.  One day I might have an article on dermatology, the next on cardiology, and the next on gynecology.  It's bringing back the love of medicine and knowledge that took me to medical school in the first place.

I don't know if this will be a long-term career, or just a stepping stone to something different, but for now it's (almost) paying the bills and providing me with a sense of purpose.  I am also building my own business, something I never thought I would do in this lifetime.  A psychic told me a few years ago that I would have my own practice/business at some point, and I thought she was insane.  I loved collecting a salary, and had absolutely no interest in striking out on my own into the scary world of non-financial security that is one's own business. 

Moral of the story:  never say never (or, never contradict a psychic, one or the other...)

Label Me Elmo

I used to love those label-makers when I was a kid.  You know the ones, the big plastic doohickeys with the wheel you spun around to find the letter you wanted.  You spun, squeezed the trigger, spun, squeezed the trigger, and on and on until you had a lovely little embossed strip of thick tape-stuff.  Peel off the backing, and voila!  A label you could stick anywhere!

Turns out, adults love labels too.  But instead of squeezing out tape strips to put on our lunch boxes, we turn to labeling ourselves and each-other.  Married.  Single.  Doctor.  Writer.  Smart.  Dumb.  How convenient it is to know which box to put people in.  The first question out of most people's mouths when they meet a stranger at a party is, "what do you do?"  The person's occupation provides a handy label, by which we think we can tell a great deal about them.  Ooo, they're a teacher so they must be dedicated and poor.  They're a physician so they must be arrogant and rich.  They're a writer so they must live in their pajamas and eat a lot of Hot Pockets.

But what if we are not defined by labels, but by our essence.  This becomes trickier for cocktail-party conversation.  "What is your essence" is a tricky question, and I would wager that most people have not done enough soul-searching to be able to answer it.  Or maybe we can never really answer it, not in words.  In deeds, perhaps, but maybe not even then.  In intention.  In our wishes and thoughts and dreams. In how we treat our partners, our friends, strangers, animals.

I've been told that people let go of labels when they are close to death.  The man who was a cattle farmer and could talk about nothing but livestock his entire life, loses interest in this topic at the end.  He moves beyond the labels and into his essence.  I haven't spent enough time with the dying to tell you whether I've observed this for myself, but it makes sense.  No-one really cares, at the end, how you made your money.  They care who you are. People stop identifying with their labels, and find out what's really inside.

Labels are powerful things.  If you let go of one, another comes right in to replace it.  I discovered this when I was getting ready to leave my career as a physician.  I knew I had to make a change, but my label said "Doctor", and what was I going to do with that?  Every time I tried to peel it off and let go of that label, a huge wave of fear swept in.  What are you going to do?  Who are you going to be? What makes you think you can change your life?  Haven't you read your label?  It took several months (years?) before I summoned up enough courage to rip off that label and actually make a change.  I tried very hard not to put a new label on while the wound from the old one was still so fresh, but that was a challenge.  An exercise in letting go, in just "being". Not easy for a type A who is used to jumping through all the hoops set up in her path. 

Making it even more challenging, I found that people like to project their labels onto us, even as we try to let go of our own.  When I announced I was leaving medicine, every single person wanted to know what I was going to do instead.  Now, I know this is natural human curiosity, but people had a really hard time with the answer, "I don't know".  My mantra became, "I'm going to take some time off to figure that out," but I could see the new labels forming even as the words were leaving my lips.  Unemployed.  Lazy.  Quitter.  Crazy.  Maybe they didn't want to think these things about me - but since I didn't give them another label to take the place of the old one, they gave me whichever one came first to mind.

Now, this isn't entirely true, or fair to the people in my life, or to me for that matter!  I had just as hard of a time refusing a new label.  So usually the second sentence, after I completed my mantra, was, "well, I am going to a conference on medical writing so we'll see...".  I just couldn't leave it at, "I don't know", and I could see the sigh of relief in my listeners too.  "At least she has a plan..."  As it turns out, my "plan" has shifted and changed and I'm now doing something I never thought I would be doing...  but that's how life goes.  I'll leave my new career a mystery for another blog post, just to avoid giving my readers a comfortable label.  Ha!

So the next time I visit my hometown, I'll have to see if my mom still has that old label-maker lying around.  Maybe I can make all-new labels.  Just so I can cut them into bits and scatter them to the wind...

Cutthroat Yoga

Do you go to Yoga classes?  If you do, you know how wonderful it makes you feel.  How blissed-out, stretched-out, and strengthened it makes you feel, no matter how crummy or fat you felt when you walked into that room.  You also, if I'm not mistaken, have probably run up against the Aggressive Yoga Ladies. 

You know the ones.  The ones who will cut your throat if you dare to place your mat on "their spot".  On an average week, I go to three yoga classes, at three different branches of my gym, with two different instructors.  Every class has its regulars, and people gravitate toward their favorite spots.  I'm no exception - I admit to having "my spot" and to being bummed if someone beats me to it.  I will even try to "scootch in" with other people, so that I can get something close to my spot (for the record:  the front row so I can correct my posture in the mirror, but not on the crack between mirror panels, on the side of the room closest to the door but a couple spots over from the instructor.  Yeah, I'm not particular at all...).  In two of my three regular classes, this isn't usually a problem.  I'm usually able to get my spot, and people are willing to scoot around so that everyone can see the mirror and no-one's bumping arms when we swan dive into forward fold.  Maybe some of the people in those classes even classify me as one of the AYLs, (I will admit it - that which bugs me about others is probably something I don't like in myself) but I really do try to work with other people in a friendly manner so we can all have a spot that makes us happy.

What I am not:  one of those people who likes to barge into the room and unfurl their mat before the preceding class has had a chance to put away their equipment.  One of those people who will actually ask someone to move out of their spot.  One of those people who will refuse to "scootch" when asked.  Those are the ladies at my wednesday yoga class.  They actually had to install a guard at the door (a hapless gym employee) so that the frontrunner AYL would stop barrelling into the room the second the music ended in the class before ours.  With the herd mentality that overcomes humans in such situations, once one person enters that room, the rest immediately surge forward so as not to be left behind.  I was even shoved once, I kid you not.  After a few weeks of the guard, the frontrunner cooled her jets a bit and would let the prior class - mostly - put away their weights and mats, and our class was no longer guarded.  Still, you can feel the energy shift the second the weightlifting class ends - sometimes even before.  People start scooting closer and closer to the door, the natives becoming restless.  Once the frontrunner breaks the barrier of the door jamb, all bets are off.  The frontrunner runs to the front of the room and stakes her claim, and that of her slightly slower friend, by throwing both mats down.  My problem is not with the frontrunner as such (although she is the one that asked me to move out of her spot the first time I attended this particular class and didn't know the dealio - she must have been late that day).  No, I'm willing to breathe, let it go, and let her have the spot if it means that much to her.  My problem is with her friend.  The friend usually nabs the spot I'm after (I'm just not willing to give in to the aggression and race her for it).    I used to naively try to share space with AYL #2.  I put a smile on my face and asked if we could share the mirror panel (necessitating her to move a little to the left - she was planted in the center of the panel) so that I wouldn't be staring at the crack (it throws off your balance, in case you're wondering why the big deal).  She told me that she didn't want to be on a crack either and moved her mat about an eighth of an inch.  She was about a foot from the crack - there was plenty of room to share.  I kept smiling and thanked her for her accomodation.  She suggested I move to a spot on the other side of the room.  Oh, now it's on!  Passive-aggressive doesn't work when it comes up against plain old aggressive!

I am trying to be the nicer, bigger person here without being a total doormat.  I still try for that spot on the mirror, but I set up a little bit staggered behind AYL #2.  I'm a little close to her mat for both of our comfort, but since I'm staggered back we don't bump into each-other.  If she just scooted a little to the left, she would still be nowhere near the mirror crack and we'd both have plenty of room, but apparently to suggest this is anathema.  I've given up.  I refuse to move to the other side of the room (it's just as crowded, the spot she was suggesting was even more cramped than the one I was trying to occupy, and who knows what kinds of AYLs are over there?).  I am letting the bullies win, but only up to a point.  They will just have to deal with me sharing their mirror panels.  If I am a fly in their ointment, so be it.  It's good for them.  :)

It's good practice for me - I have a tendency to get too attached to things, including "my" yoga spot.  This class is a weekly reminder that I can let that go, that I can be in a spot slightly more cramped and slightly behind where I'd like to be, and it's okay - I still get a great yoga session.  I feel myself getting anxious about the weekly encounter with these ladies, and I practice letting go of that anxiety.  Neither AYL #1 or #2 will budge an inch on where they want to be, so that forces inflexible me to be the flexible one and adjust what I want to fit what I can get.  It's good for me, I suppose.  I could always throw an elbow or sprint ahead of those ladies, but it's not worth it.  I don't want to become one of them, and encountering them each week is a good reminder of that. 

I'm sure they don't see themselves as AYLs, just as I don't see myself as one.  I'm sure they don't think they're being at all unreasonable.  I don't know if they see the irony in racing to stake out their spot for a class that's supposed to be about calm, and about letting go of competition.  I need to stop being an AYL for long enough to realize that I can't teach them that lesson.  I can just angle for my spot and hope for the best!

See?  I'm smiling!  Not aggressive at all.

Fear

I'm back!  I haven't posted for a couple weeks - partly because of the holiday weekend coinciding with my wedding anniversary, and partly (okay, mostly) because I hit a wall of fear.  Kinda like this:

photo:  Wickpedia.  The Scream by Edvard Munch

I think it's a common human experience... We overcome fear in order to take steps toward happiness, then all of a sudden, fear rears its head again.  "I thought I was over you," we say.  "Nope," fear replies, "I'm always here, waiting for you". 

There are many types of fear, but the one I've been dealing with, in many areas of my life, is fear of success.  It sounds bizarre, but fear of success is a very real, albeit oddly self-defeating, entity.  I thought I had dealt with the fear when I made the decision to leave my career and embark in a new direction.  Naturally, there are day-to-day fears (financial being the number-one when one leaves a physician's salary but still has a physician's mortgage).  Those are normal, healthy fears.  It keeps us safe to be afraid of disease, ax-murderers, and telemarketers.  But fear of success?  How is that helpful?

Our minds, those whirling, busy maelstroms of thought, really resist change.  Even if the status-quo is painful and hurtful, at least it is a known quantity, and our minds will always choose the known over the scary unknown.  Unless we set the intention that we are going to try something new.  Even then, the mind balks.  "What do you mean, something new?" it cries.  "We don't want new!"  If you've ever wondered why people don't leave abusive relationships, why people lose (or gain) weight only to relapse to their former selves once they're achieved their goals, this fear of change has everything to do with it.  We'd always rather fight the battle we know, than take on a new one and have to change the way we see ourselves.  Even if we see ourselves as helpless, fat, ugly, weak, or any of the other perjoratives we hurl inward, at least these are known battles to us.  If we shift our worldview, our perception of ourselves in that world must shift and the mind recoils.  You'd think the mind would want to feel better - isn't it "better" to think of oneself as beautiful rather than ugly?  But if "beautiful" requires the mind to reset its go-to patterns, it will resist mightily.  It will think of (and shout at you) every possible reason that the new view cannot be true.  It can take a herculean effort to reset those automatic thoughts. 

This is fear of success, in a nutshell.  I've mentioned that I'm writing a book, and using this blog to explore some ideas and concepts for that book.  You'd think I'd want the book to be successful, and for this blog to become a worldwide phenomenon, right?  Apparently not!  Success opens one up to criticism, which is always scary.  And so, as I thought about what to write next, I got overwhelmed with the magnitude of the project and just shut down.  Ideas dried up.  I found other things to do with my time (not difficult when one is a master procrastinator!) 

How does one overcome this fear?  With faith.  It can be faith in a higher power or the support of the universe.  It can be faith that one's self-preservation instinct will not let one make a deadly mistake. It can be faith that you can take whatever criticism (or praise) that comes your way and keep your self-esteem intact.  Faith that people (or even just one person) will like what you have to say, will get something out of it.  Faith that there is a happier version of you, just waiting for you to take that leap, make that change.

It's not called a Leap of Faith for nothing.  You just have to jump, without knowing where the safety net is, or if one even exists.  The fear will always be there, waiting for you.  The fear will always take you back if the leap of faith doesn't work out... but what if it does?  What if?

Psychic Travels

So it turns out I'm not the first person to want to leave medicine!  Or even to write about it!  Wayyyyyyyyy back in 1988 (yes, that's sarcasm, although when I do the math, it's been 24 years and that makes me feel old), Michael Crichton (yes, him again) wrote a book called Travels. In it, he describes his extensive travels around the globe, mostly to lesser-trodden locales.  He details the self-insight and life lessons each journey teaches him, but he begins the book with a description of his four years in medical school. 

This book was recommended to me by my wonderful career-change coach, and at first I wasn't sure why.  Sure, I love to travel and MC has traveled to some amazing places.  He also describes his journeys on the spiritual plane - from psychic readings to astral projection to meditating in the desert, talking to a cactus for two weeks!  Initially, I wasn't really sure why he chose to begin his book with his med school days, since it doesn't really match up with the rest of the book, but he eventually spells it out - if he hadn't changed careers, if he had stayed in medicine, he might not have been forced into the sort of change that lays the track for all kinds of other life-changing experiences. 

MC started out as an English major, but found the English department at Harvard to be less than pleasant.  He switched to anthropology, and took some premed courses, "just in case".  He found the pre-med world to be quite different from the rest of Harvard, where people were less caught up in grades, and more eager for the learning experience in general.  In pre-med courses, he stepped "into a different world - nasty and competitive".  People would sabotage their classmates without a second thought - we called those people "gunners" by the time I went to med school.  No thought or consideration for anything but their own success.

He makes a couple comments that I found laugh-out-loud funny.  The first, regarding the gunners who gave out wrong answers to classmates who asked for help in his chemistry class and who sabotaged his lab experiments so he would start fires: "I was uncomfortable with the hostile and paranoid attitude this course demanded for success.  I thought that a humane profession like medicine ought to encourage other values in its candidates.  But nobody was asking my opinion."  How could I have found this LOL-funny?  Because it's true...  A quarter of a century later, medicine is still encouraging hostile, inhumane behaviour.  Not overtly, of course, and I do believe that things have improved.  My medical school had very few gunners, and overall was a pretty supportive place.  We were encouraged to explore our humanity, and we even had a humanities requirement in the curriculum (my favorite course - Red Flag #382 for my clinical career).  But I believe that the training, particularly by the time one gets to residency, beats most, if not all, of the humanity out of one. MC describes, "This... seemed more like hazing, like a professional initiation, than education."  I had to hunker down to get through it, and that hunkering down necessitated a complete absence of work on my inner self and created a version of myself that I really didn't like.

He continues, "I got through it as best I could.  I imagined medicine to be a caring profession, and a scientific one as well.  It was so fast-moving that its practitioners could not afford to be dogmatic; they would be flexible and open-minded."  Ha, ha.  Very funny, MC.  I am priveleged to know a lot of physicians who are wonderful people, caring as well as scientifically smart.  But I also know a lot of the other kind...  I will say that I believe that med schools today are trying to create more of the former, but unfortunately the profession does attract a fair number of the latter.  MC elaborates, "I learned that the best doctors found a middle position where they were neither overwhelmed by their feelings nor estranged from them.  That was the most difficult position of all, and the precise balance - neither too detached nor too caring - was something few learned...
 "It was certainly interesting work, and there was no doubt that you were doing something worthwhile with your life, helping sick people." This is true.  Medicine was, and is, an incredibly worthwhile profession, and it can be a very rewarding one as well. 

He goes on to tell some anecdotes about his pre-clinical and clinical training.  He explores the development of the gallows humor that anyone who deals with illness and death on a daily basis develops to some extent.  He describes the apalling behaviour of residents and attendings with whom he interacts, and his struggles with some patients.  He develops a theory of illness that requires that people take ownership of and responsibility for their mental and physical health.  He quits medicine.

MC tried four different times to quit medical school.  At the time, he was required to meet with a psychiatrist before he could quit.  The psychiatrist talked him into continuing every time, basically telling him he hadn't gotten yet to the part he wouldn't hate.  The psychiatrist did this each of the first three years of med school, then finally gave up the ghost, saying "I thought you would quit in the end".  MC finished out his four years, then quit medicine before ever becoming licensed or practicing.  Here's where my experience differed.  I actually enjoyed the classroom aspect of medical school, and I enjoyed many of my clinical rotations.  I still had (a little) time to devote to outside pursuits (reading, dancing).  The rotations I didn't enjoy were the ones that impinged the most on my outside life, or that were extremely stressful.  Red Flag #936. 

Now, MC had a backup.  He was already making money as an author during medical school.  He quit to become a writer, and he was already somewhat established by the time he gave up medicine.  He also had a tool with which to meet the naysayers when he publicized his decision to quit medicine.  "In quitting, I was following my instincts; I was doing what I really wanted to do.  But most people saw only that I was giving up a lot of prestige...They admired my determination, but they thought I was pretty unrealistic."  Hmmmm, sounds familiar.  MC, though, had written a little thing called The Andromeda Strain which was about to become a movie.  Once it was known he was a successful writer, people got off his back.  "All the doctors and residents who had shunned me became suddenly interested in me."

I have no Andromeda Strain in my back pocket.  I've got this blog, I'm working on a website, and I'm doing some medical editing and writing on a freelance basis.  My future best-seller of a book (think positive!) is still a mass of unorganized, unedited words on my computer.  But I do have one thing in common with Dr. Crichton:  I am following my instincts and walking away from an unhappy life, forward into the great unknown.  Cheers!

Sick of Being Sick

I've had an annoying, nagging cough for the last couple of weeks.  I never got really sick, but I'm sure taking my time getting better...  Before leaving medicine, I would have ignored it and plowed ahead with my busy life.  Now, I wonder what my body is trying to tell me...  Sometimes a cough is just a cough, but let's back up here to a little object lesson in psychosomatics...

I felt like I was sick all the time in residency.  I had been ill here and there in medical school – the worst was on my Pediatrics rotation.  All those little kids sucking on your stethoscope and coughing in your face will give you the flu like nobody’s business, I don’t care how many flu shots you get.  But in residency it got truly ridiculous.  Serotonin levels were down and cortisol was through the roof!  I was always getting the cold-of-the-moment, and when I wasn’t sick, I was feeling ill.  I often had stomach upset and general malaise.  Occasionally, more concrete abdominal pain.  Too bad I couldn’t see that it was probably psychic, not physical.  My body knew I was on the wrong path, even if my consciousness hadn't yet gotten the message.  But I didn’t pay attention, and continued on to graduation.  No surprise, it continued after I finished residency and began practicing out in the real world.  Yes, of course, when you see sick people for a living, you’re bound to get sick once in a while.  All the hand-washing in the world can’t save you from that cold or flu virus when it’s all over the hospital or your office.   But it’s not just that.  Working crazy hours compromises the immune system and raises cortisol levels.  The body is so stressed, it can’t muster the energy to fight off anything else, so you get sick.  But it's not just that, either. 

When you’ve stuffed down all of the emotions and inner voices that are crying out at you to make a change (you must suppress these in order to do what you do), they're going to come out physically. That's what psychosomatic means, although any good physician knows that only happens to other people, right?  I saw patients all the time who would come into the OB triage unit with vague complaints of dizziness or non-specific abdominal pain.  Often, there was something going on at home – either domestic violence or just being ignored on a Friday night.  They wanted a little attention, and a physical complaint was a "valid" way to get it.  I could recognize it in my patients, but couldn’t see my own “I don’t feel well” status as Red Flag #256.  Zero Insight Girl, that was me!

By the last year I was practicing, I was breaking out in angry, painful red welts under my arms each time I had a call shift.  I thought it must be the surgical scrubs, so I would take hospital scrubs home to launder them in my own detergent.  I saw my dermatologist who tested for allergies - all negative.  It took seven courses of antibiotics and a few rounds of topical steroids to calm  my skin before my wedding day.  I also took six weeks off work before the wedding, both allowing my skin to heal and because I felt I needed that time off to be a sane person on my wedding day (Red Flag #257, there you go!  If you need that much time off to feel and look like a normal person, something is wrong with your working situation).  Maybe it truly was a bacterial infection, but I think it had not a little to do with stress and something in me screaming out to be heard – if you won’t listen to me, I’ll give you physical symptoms so you have to pay attention! 

The thing is, that only works if you are tuned into it.  Otherwise it just leads to more denial, and an outward focus on the physical symptoms.  They at least detract your attention from the inner turmoil, and give you something upon which to blame your misery.  They will only heal, however, if you learn to dig out the real issues and deal with them.  Since this is both difficult and scary, most people choose never to go there.  I was not exactly raised to embrace my emotions, so allowing myself to feel them was terrifying, and it took a few years - this is certainly not something that happened overnight.  Once I started paying attention, however, there was no going back.  Luckily, by the time the outbreaks started, I already knew I was on my way out of medicine.  That didn't stop my body from trying to reinforce the message.  "What do you mean, you're giving six months notice?  Are you crazy?  You need to get out now!" 

And since I quit?  Clear skin and clear skies...  except for that stupid cough.