Sunday, 19 April 2015
Mid life crisis
Is it possible to have a mid life crisis at 28? Doubtful, but that's what I prefer to call the last two months. Another acceptable description would be 'severe burnout'. I got back from South Africa and I was instantly obsessed with getting a new car. Why? Who really knows, but my justification was that I observed others driving manual in England and in South Africa, and I wanted one. There were of course very stringent parameters as always. I wanted a car that had manual transmission, a nice looking interior, and was cheap. 'Nice looking' to me meant 'old with few buttons and no screens', something I figured out for myself much later in the car buying adventure. Ease of import to Canada was a criteria I didn't really bring to the forefront but I used it to judge what I would buy, although for some reason I was too impatient to wait until residency was done. Then my parents came by and I yelled at my mom for not using her head, then I complained incessantly at work, and then finally one day I caught myself being generally grinchy when my EM elective in Alberta was confirmed. I thought to myself, why do I hate everything? Was it always like this? I'm gonna go back to meditating, like I would in med school. Also, every opportunity to eat food is a test of resolve toward weight loss (learned this the hard way today over fries and ice cream). Also....I like my '86 NA 944 :-)
Thursday, 26 February 2015
At peace
5 minutes before morning signout right now. Back from vacation in South Africa (more on that later). Wanted to share something quick, before the program director gets here and before everyone puts on their game faces. Everyone has different motivations for which they do things. Some do things for themselves, some for others, some for specific material or other tangible goals. Dieting and exercise was initially about being healthy for me, but I later realized I was more motivated to do it to attract women. Oop, program director's here. My new motivation for doing things, is to be at peace. More on this later.
Tuesday, 7 October 2014
Commitments
Many people make commitments nowadays without following them. Gone are the days where someone can be killed for something they say. No, I don't believe it would be wise at all to petition for those days to return, more so to educate a younger generation about the importance of following through.
There are times when I guarantee things to patients in the hospital and the clinic. I've learned after a year of medicine to offer all guarantees as a statistic. I've learned to say "99% of the people we treat with this recover fully" or "I can say within 95% confidence that you're going to walk out of this hospital before the week is over". Saying "I am sure" or "I promise", these are expensive words that I've been taught not to use.
The same is not true, however, when we make commitments to others. I organize dinners for residency applicants this year, and I've had more than one person say, at a recruitment meeting, "People will sign up" "People will go" "You should have no trouble finding people to go". Someone suggested, a while ago, that there be a calendar for dinner, one on which people can sign up and commit to going to dinner, meeting applicants the night before their interview, and telling them all about the program. My resident colleagues said, during the meetings, "People will go", but they didn't specify who would go, and when they themselves would go. Filling up the first month took a lot of texting and emailing, but I managed to fill up an entire month in advance with people committed to dinner. Nobody has broken their commitments yet, possibly because there's an online accessible dinner calendar that everyone can view, possibly because there's an incentive, and possibly because this whole recruiting thing matters to them. It was, however, quite difficult to get people to commit to something more than a week in advance.
There have been many times in my life when my parents, my relatives, people I've hung out with in university, high school, have made "commitments" and have never kept them. The problem here is that, when someone says they're going to do something, the word "commitment" doesn't fall in line behind whatever statement they make. This becomes most painful when someone commits something to oneself, and realizes how far they've strayed later on. You promise yourself you'll learn a musical instrument, another language, you'll get thinner, you'll make more money, you'll eat better, you'll save more, you'll read, travel and create. A few months go by, and you see someone else jamming, you hear that foreign language, you double-look in the mirror, you groan one time too often while you're on the clock, you catch yourself before opening that small aromatic cardboard box, your bank account reads wrong, you see that book at the bottom of the clutter pile when the light shines on it at just the right angle, you see the travel ad and remind yourself of that place you thought of going a while ago but ended up going to "the cottage" or "the lake" or "up North", "Down south" in lieu of taking a vacation to somewhere completely unknown. And you made nothing.
I'm gonna try committing to one thing at a time. I'll start a new commitment when the old commitment becomes routine. Right now, my "routine" is to come home, eat too many PB and J sandwiches, watch too much Conan, get tired, have just enough energy to pack the bike bag for work, and then shower and go to bed without doing my physical therapy exercises. I don't know which commitment to start with, but I'm going to let myself decide by whatever feels most important right now.
There was one commitment which has become routine, almost. Since February, I've put 1537 bike commuting miles down, roughly $700 saved when adding gas, depreciation of vehicle, cost of car tires and cost of car maintenance. Sometimes I can commit. I wonder if I can commit to this blog.
There are times when I guarantee things to patients in the hospital and the clinic. I've learned after a year of medicine to offer all guarantees as a statistic. I've learned to say "99% of the people we treat with this recover fully" or "I can say within 95% confidence that you're going to walk out of this hospital before the week is over". Saying "I am sure" or "I promise", these are expensive words that I've been taught not to use.
The same is not true, however, when we make commitments to others. I organize dinners for residency applicants this year, and I've had more than one person say, at a recruitment meeting, "People will sign up" "People will go" "You should have no trouble finding people to go". Someone suggested, a while ago, that there be a calendar for dinner, one on which people can sign up and commit to going to dinner, meeting applicants the night before their interview, and telling them all about the program. My resident colleagues said, during the meetings, "People will go", but they didn't specify who would go, and when they themselves would go. Filling up the first month took a lot of texting and emailing, but I managed to fill up an entire month in advance with people committed to dinner. Nobody has broken their commitments yet, possibly because there's an online accessible dinner calendar that everyone can view, possibly because there's an incentive, and possibly because this whole recruiting thing matters to them. It was, however, quite difficult to get people to commit to something more than a week in advance.
There have been many times in my life when my parents, my relatives, people I've hung out with in university, high school, have made "commitments" and have never kept them. The problem here is that, when someone says they're going to do something, the word "commitment" doesn't fall in line behind whatever statement they make. This becomes most painful when someone commits something to oneself, and realizes how far they've strayed later on. You promise yourself you'll learn a musical instrument, another language, you'll get thinner, you'll make more money, you'll eat better, you'll save more, you'll read, travel and create. A few months go by, and you see someone else jamming, you hear that foreign language, you double-look in the mirror, you groan one time too often while you're on the clock, you catch yourself before opening that small aromatic cardboard box, your bank account reads wrong, you see that book at the bottom of the clutter pile when the light shines on it at just the right angle, you see the travel ad and remind yourself of that place you thought of going a while ago but ended up going to "the cottage" or "the lake" or "up North", "Down south" in lieu of taking a vacation to somewhere completely unknown. And you made nothing.
I'm gonna try committing to one thing at a time. I'll start a new commitment when the old commitment becomes routine. Right now, my "routine" is to come home, eat too many PB and J sandwiches, watch too much Conan, get tired, have just enough energy to pack the bike bag for work, and then shower and go to bed without doing my physical therapy exercises. I don't know which commitment to start with, but I'm going to let myself decide by whatever feels most important right now.
There was one commitment which has become routine, almost. Since February, I've put 1537 bike commuting miles down, roughly $700 saved when adding gas, depreciation of vehicle, cost of car tires and cost of car maintenance. Sometimes I can commit. I wonder if I can commit to this blog.
Tuesday, 13 May 2014
Second thoughts
Sometimes I'll get an idea into my head, and I'll take some initiative and carry it a small distance .... and then I'll have second thoughts. These generally involve an idea being not worth my time, or too complicated to follow any further, or the idea being too stressful to undertake, and then they involve me quitting and doing something else. Chess is a good example of such an idea, where I stopped playing simply because being better at chess would require me to actually study the game, and I felt as though all that would lead to is being better at chess, nothing really life-applicable. Video games are another example of an abandoned pursuit, although that was moreso because I thought girls wouldn't be into them. The reasons for which I stopped playing video games back in the day were, I thought, fairly foolish, but in hindsight I'm glad I put them away because I'm not sure I would have discovered a hobby like cycling so easily if I were still playing. Strictly PC games, my parents never did agree to buying a console for the house and I'm glad they didn't.
Blogging is another idea about which I recently had second thoughts on a trip to Thailand. I was in Thailand for two weeks, and before I left, I thought to myself, " I should really write about this trip, I should blog about it every day, as much as I can". Then I actually went on the trip, and I found myself impossibly tired by the end of every day. Not as tired as I was in Europe, that was a whole different level of pain and fatigue, but tired enough that, by the time we all got back to the hotel rooms, all I really wanted to do was sleep or "pass out" as my friends often phrase it.
I entertained the idea of keeping a journal again, or typing stuff into a Word document, or keeping an audio or video journal. Then I knocked each of those ideas down because a written journal would mean slow writing versus fast typing, an audio/video journal would be completely unedited and nobody would ever be able to review it, least of all me, and a written Word document .... it's not like anybody actually sees this blog anyway, and when it came down to this versus a written Word document, I just didn't want this to be another thing on which I gave up. I also do enjoy the thought that people in China might actually be reading this, so I'd rather keep this up.
So I'm actually not going to write about Thailand, not for now anyway. I might do a "Recollections" piece on it at some point, but basically the plan for now is to write every day or as close to it as possible. When something interesting happens during the day, I'll write about that. When nothing interesting happens during the day, I'll let my mind cycle through memories until I find a "Recollections"-worthy memory and I'll write about that. For now, it's noteworthy to say that, since the last time I wrote in this journal, a fair bit has changed. I've met more women, I've done more cycling (I commute to work by bicycle now), I've made a more firm commitment to ameliorate my diet (which shall be tested tomorrow because the program always gives free lunch on Wednesdays, and lunch is usually nutritionally quite hopeless), but I'm still a fat-ass and I still don't have a girlfriend. Not to worry though, all good things take time. Great things, though ... great things happen all at once.
Blogging is another idea about which I recently had second thoughts on a trip to Thailand. I was in Thailand for two weeks, and before I left, I thought to myself, " I should really write about this trip, I should blog about it every day, as much as I can". Then I actually went on the trip, and I found myself impossibly tired by the end of every day. Not as tired as I was in Europe, that was a whole different level of pain and fatigue, but tired enough that, by the time we all got back to the hotel rooms, all I really wanted to do was sleep or "pass out" as my friends often phrase it.
I entertained the idea of keeping a journal again, or typing stuff into a Word document, or keeping an audio or video journal. Then I knocked each of those ideas down because a written journal would mean slow writing versus fast typing, an audio/video journal would be completely unedited and nobody would ever be able to review it, least of all me, and a written Word document .... it's not like anybody actually sees this blog anyway, and when it came down to this versus a written Word document, I just didn't want this to be another thing on which I gave up. I also do enjoy the thought that people in China might actually be reading this, so I'd rather keep this up.
So I'm actually not going to write about Thailand, not for now anyway. I might do a "Recollections" piece on it at some point, but basically the plan for now is to write every day or as close to it as possible. When something interesting happens during the day, I'll write about that. When nothing interesting happens during the day, I'll let my mind cycle through memories until I find a "Recollections"-worthy memory and I'll write about that. For now, it's noteworthy to say that, since the last time I wrote in this journal, a fair bit has changed. I've met more women, I've done more cycling (I commute to work by bicycle now), I've made a more firm commitment to ameliorate my diet (which shall be tested tomorrow because the program always gives free lunch on Wednesdays, and lunch is usually nutritionally quite hopeless), but I'm still a fat-ass and I still don't have a girlfriend. Not to worry though, all good things take time. Great things, though ... great things happen all at once.
Wednesday, 26 February 2014
Recalibrating
Sometimes things happen in life that cause us to shift from our normal routine. Sometimes those things are good, sometimes they are bad. Homeostasis is the idea that the human body finds a balance and, when something is added or removed to that balance, everything else realigns to a new state of balance.
That may be what's going on with my life right now. I have three or so months left in my first year of residency, and there's still lots of reading to be done and an entire in-service exam that needs correction, readings that need to be finished. I need to cut away time each day ( now that I'm on the easier rotations) to get these things done.
Then there's the relationship status, which right now is null. I have fun every now and then but I'm looking for something serious, something meaningful that will lead to something real. It's not easy finding someone who doesn't play games up front and act really immature, and while I know how to deal with that sort of nonsense nowadays vs in the past, I feel as though I shouldn't have to do so for the woman I would end up marrying one day.
Then there's the exercise and healthy eating front, both of which I simply have not been following. Recalibrating here would mean actually managing to sleep early enough in order to get up at 5 am and ride to the hospital, and then ride back home afterward. Eating healthy would actually mean buying ingredients, prepping, and baking and partitioning things into tupperware boxes. There's no set routine down for this sort of thing yet, I've just been doing whatever for the last two months in terms of food. I haven't gained a horrible amount of weight, but I haven't lost any either.
I had to hire a lawyer because of license suspension issues with my car, none of which were actually my fault. Knowing the American justice system, if it does indeed get suspended, then I may end up biking to work a lot more than I previously planned. I don't mind it though.
My overall level of anxiety is much lower than it was before the car accident, but I still stay up at night pondering my life. I'm on call this weekend, and so there's very little free time, definitely none with which to go out and meet people. Maybe those few hours I have when I go home before I go to sleep, is really time I can use to recalibrate.
Oh, and I'm going to write more. A lot more.
That may be what's going on with my life right now. I have three or so months left in my first year of residency, and there's still lots of reading to be done and an entire in-service exam that needs correction, readings that need to be finished. I need to cut away time each day ( now that I'm on the easier rotations) to get these things done.
Then there's the relationship status, which right now is null. I have fun every now and then but I'm looking for something serious, something meaningful that will lead to something real. It's not easy finding someone who doesn't play games up front and act really immature, and while I know how to deal with that sort of nonsense nowadays vs in the past, I feel as though I shouldn't have to do so for the woman I would end up marrying one day.
Then there's the exercise and healthy eating front, both of which I simply have not been following. Recalibrating here would mean actually managing to sleep early enough in order to get up at 5 am and ride to the hospital, and then ride back home afterward. Eating healthy would actually mean buying ingredients, prepping, and baking and partitioning things into tupperware boxes. There's no set routine down for this sort of thing yet, I've just been doing whatever for the last two months in terms of food. I haven't gained a horrible amount of weight, but I haven't lost any either.
I had to hire a lawyer because of license suspension issues with my car, none of which were actually my fault. Knowing the American justice system, if it does indeed get suspended, then I may end up biking to work a lot more than I previously planned. I don't mind it though.
My overall level of anxiety is much lower than it was before the car accident, but I still stay up at night pondering my life. I'm on call this weekend, and so there's very little free time, definitely none with which to go out and meet people. Maybe those few hours I have when I go home before I go to sleep, is really time I can use to recalibrate.
Oh, and I'm going to write more. A lot more.
Tuesday, 24 December 2013
Merry Christmas Everyone
I've had a particularly busy November-December. Something happened, though, in December, just 5 or so days ago , that completely changed my outlook on life. Or so I'd like to imagine.
Residency has been going "fine" so far, but I had been feeling very anxious about getting enough reading done and doing a good job etc. and one of my seniors sat me down and tried (probably successfully) to set me straight with the whole "relax, everyone goes through this" speech. Then I decided to drive home the next day, and I crashed my car.
I was passing someone in the left lane, and the guy wavered toward my lane, so I nudged my steering wheel and my car started to slide (freezing rain pouring down this whole time, on the highway). My car first veers to the left, then I try to get control of it and it veers off dangerously to the right. It hits a mound of grass on the side of the road, and from there I'm really not sure what happened, all I know for sure is that I didn't black out. I just squinted hard, gripped the wheel and stared forward, and apparently the car flipped on its side for about 60 feet or so before landing on its wheels. I looked around when I had stopped but I couldn't find my phone. Some random people came off the highway and ran down to help me out. They called 9 1 1 and cut out the side airbag so that they could see how I was doing. Firemen came, ripped the driver's side door off so they could pull me out onto a stretched (collar and all, no injuries though) and paramedics took me to the nearest hospital.
I was discharged that day with no injuries and a negative CT scan. Minor concussion. This accident added a lot of perspective to the worrying I did for the first 6 months of residency, where I felt like I simply couldn't do anything right. If it were a smaller car, I may have been more seriously injured, or dead.
I'm not sure what will actually happen now. I want to say I'll change my worrying ways completely, and I'll start eating healthy , and I'll start exercising, but all of those things don't happen together. At the very least, for now, I should acknowledge that, if I can survive a car crash, I can survive a tough month of rotations with attendings making mildly dissatisfied remarks and making comments like "you have to know this" or "you guys should go home and read about this stuff", because on a tough rotation like ICU for example, the best play apparently is to just go home and sleep. "best" in the sense that it's the play that avoids burnout. Burnout is something I have to stay away from, I'm very near to it, and rest/reboot is the only cure. If there's no time for rest, the only way to avoid burnout is to effectively handle stress. If anyone has had any revelations on how to effectively handle stress, I'd like to hear them. For now, I'm just going to take a few seconds extra when I feel things starting to build, and once I acknowledge they're there, I'm going to stare down my stress until it dissipates. Clock time, not psychological time. Eckhart Tolle. Let's see how far that gets me.
Merry Christmas guys.
Residency has been going "fine" so far, but I had been feeling very anxious about getting enough reading done and doing a good job etc. and one of my seniors sat me down and tried (probably successfully) to set me straight with the whole "relax, everyone goes through this" speech. Then I decided to drive home the next day, and I crashed my car.
I was passing someone in the left lane, and the guy wavered toward my lane, so I nudged my steering wheel and my car started to slide (freezing rain pouring down this whole time, on the highway). My car first veers to the left, then I try to get control of it and it veers off dangerously to the right. It hits a mound of grass on the side of the road, and from there I'm really not sure what happened, all I know for sure is that I didn't black out. I just squinted hard, gripped the wheel and stared forward, and apparently the car flipped on its side for about 60 feet or so before landing on its wheels. I looked around when I had stopped but I couldn't find my phone. Some random people came off the highway and ran down to help me out. They called 9 1 1 and cut out the side airbag so that they could see how I was doing. Firemen came, ripped the driver's side door off so they could pull me out onto a stretched (collar and all, no injuries though) and paramedics took me to the nearest hospital.
I was discharged that day with no injuries and a negative CT scan. Minor concussion. This accident added a lot of perspective to the worrying I did for the first 6 months of residency, where I felt like I simply couldn't do anything right. If it were a smaller car, I may have been more seriously injured, or dead.
I'm not sure what will actually happen now. I want to say I'll change my worrying ways completely, and I'll start eating healthy , and I'll start exercising, but all of those things don't happen together. At the very least, for now, I should acknowledge that, if I can survive a car crash, I can survive a tough month of rotations with attendings making mildly dissatisfied remarks and making comments like "you have to know this" or "you guys should go home and read about this stuff", because on a tough rotation like ICU for example, the best play apparently is to just go home and sleep. "best" in the sense that it's the play that avoids burnout. Burnout is something I have to stay away from, I'm very near to it, and rest/reboot is the only cure. If there's no time for rest, the only way to avoid burnout is to effectively handle stress. If anyone has had any revelations on how to effectively handle stress, I'd like to hear them. For now, I'm just going to take a few seconds extra when I feel things starting to build, and once I acknowledge they're there, I'm going to stare down my stress until it dissipates. Clock time, not psychological time. Eckhart Tolle. Let's see how far that gets me.
Merry Christmas guys.
Thursday, 7 November 2013
The Low Points
Many people look back on their lives and sometimes say "That was the low point". Well, for me the "low point" as it were seems to cycle every so often. I'm very unhealthy about what I eat, I'm very unscheduled about what time I wake up, whether or not I perform my morning or night routines, I barely exercise, and I'm generally unenthused about my job. Life has been this way for a bit over a week now, and I feel as though I'm being followed everywhere I go by an overwhelming feeling of pointlessness. I feel, at times, as though there's some eternal understanding that, whatever I do, I'm going to stay fat, I'm going to stay ignorant, I'm never going to learn everything I want to learn, I'm not going to be able to rise to the occasion, and I have managed to succeed and achieve whatever I have achieved mostly because of luck, randomness, having a good personality, the kindness and relatable nature of others, and other nonsense like that.
That's all a bunch of baloney. I need to snap out of this. The problem is, even if I do start waking up early, exercising, eating right (I have enough healthy food jammed into my freezer to last me a while), taking more care to perform my morning and evening routines (which, honestly relate more to shaving my face and brushing my teeth than any longer rituals that others would imagine), what's to keep me from hitting a psychological slump in another 2 months time and failing to take care of myself? I will have put back on all the weight I took off (I'm 142 now, slowly creeping upward) and I will have once again done a great injustice to my body, my mind and my way of life in general.
My greatest issue right now is, sadly, that I have to find something to make me want to stay sharp, physically and mentally. I don't feel like staying sharp physically because I don't see why I should if my shoulder tendonitis is going to inhibit me from pushing my body to the max...but I can still push myself and get a tough workout in without aggravating it. I'm pretty sure I can anyways. Pull-ups are difficult for someone like me. One would think being a doctor would prompt someone to know everything about everything, but the task is extremely daunting, especially when everyone around me appears to know more than I do, about everything. That doesn't mean I should stop reading altogether though. It actually means I should read more. But I don't.
Eastern philosophy teaches not to work for the sake of results. It teaches to find purpose in the work itself, to be dedicated to the process. More of a "Journey not destination" type thinking. Either that or I'm misinterpreting things entirely. "We must be the same in praise and in blame" and "Be mindful about everything you do" echo in my head. I guess it's difficult to be mindful about something if I choose not to do it. What if I'm mindful about how I use my time? Might that help?
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