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.
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