Housejob Chronicles: A Year Later

#Doctorlife #AYearLater #GladToBeDone

Life as a doctor

It is about two weeks since I completed my one-year internship training as a doctor.

Or, as we call it in Nigeria, Housemanship. Housejob.

Your house is your job. Ha-ha.

It feels surreal, and ordinary at the same time. Like, I am excited about being done. And it also feels very underwhelming.

I am back into the odd swirl of adulthood’s what is next?

And I do not like that. I do not enjoy it at all. Still, I am here to celebrate, to reflect, not have an almost-existential crisis. Ha-ha.

The thing with being in this moment is that when I first got inducted into the profession it was so euphoric. After years and years of work, I was finally realizing the dream that I had worked so hard for. And then I got a job and really, it was a surprise in many, many ways. Some of them better than others.

LIVING THE DREAM

What advice would I give someone who is just starting housejob, or just passed their qualifying exams to become a doctor?

Enjoy the thrill of the newness as much as possible. It fizzles out very quickly.

I mean, that sounds very grim. Maybe more than it really is. After all, if you got the chance to school in Nigeria, and completed your training, you would have an idea of what it looks like to be a doctor working in conditions that are sometimes resource poor. And maybe with patients who are also very resource poor. In the worst of situations, both.

But I think it is a pretty rewarding thing. One of the highlights of my working life is when I remember the way I did something, or made a diagnosis that helped someone else’s quality of life. Or even, stopped them from dying entirely.

It is still such a head-spinning thing, knowing that I have the skills and knowledge to actually save someone’s life. What a humbling privilege. It is a dream in its own right. In its own way.

But I don’t think it is the dream for me. But it is still a very spectacular thing to have handed to me, and it is a responsibility that I intend to take very, very seriously for as long as I practice.

THE REALITY.

One of the hardest things that I have had to adjust to is staying up over the night. Like, what is that? How is that a real thing??

I remember when I was a child, and my old brother – a confirmed night owl – would tell me about how he spent the whole night playing video games. I was truly amazed that there was someone who could stay past 12am. Like, they were awake at midnight because they chose to, Because they hadn’t slept. Not because they woke up to pee – or, more commonly as a child – because I needed a midnight snack.

I didn’t know what it was like to be awake to watch a consecutive sunset and a sunrise, till I was fully an adult.

Even now, a year of taking overnight calls later, I still do not like it. I am still not built for a night spent awake.

It is one of those ‘realizations’ that I had, even though I already knew years and years ago.

But on a better note, there is something new I realized I am built for: patient work.

As a medical student, the thing I was most interested in specializing in was Pathology – the study and diagnosis of diseases. I love the complex interplay of how the body just fights, and thinks of ingenious, and sometimes misguided ways of trying to heal itself. Of staying alive, surviving for another day.

The intellectual rigor of doing that was so attractive to me. It is still so attractive to me.

The perks of specializing in that field are numerous, and is still seems so juicy and tempting to me: a solid work-life balance, work that isn’t physically demanding: I do not have to take overnight calls, I do not have to deal with the complex emotions of patients who are going through a lot.

That last part, was one of the biggest deciding factors. I didn’t have a great time as a medical student in dealing with patients. The respect and regard that was given without thinking to my older, larger course mates was not given to me. I wrote about the complexities of navigating patient interactions as a soft-spoken, small-bodied woman. That piece got published in my final year, when I thought that was what I had to look forward to as a doctor; being disrespected by the patients that I was working hard to help.

It's a very different reality now.

I don’t know if it is something in me that has changed: I am definitely more confident now that I know that I am a doctor and I have the authority to tell people what to do about their health. But I don’t know if it is also just a change in environment; a young female doctor is not such a novelty here in Lagos as it would be in Ondo where I trained.

I guess that switch has helped me consider clinical medicine afresh. That maybe there is a place for me in it after all.

AND SOME NOTES ON WHAT I’VE LEARNT

Housejob is a year to learn. I heard that said over, and over, and over again.

And boy did I learn.

But I didn’t learn only how to do clinical work: make diagnoses, carry out caesarean sections, resuscitate a newborn. Counsel someone who was literally doing things that would kill them in the long-term.

• I learnt about being a human being.

  
  

There is so much that I love to say and write about the wonders, the joys, the sadness of inhabiting existence as a human being.

It is one of the biggest themes in my creative work, one of the most recurring ones. I am truly, and fully, head-over-heels fascinated by the fact that we get to be human. To have the intricacy to our existence be such a cosmic, transcendent thing when we dare to pay attention. In my first year as a doctor, I am afraid that I did not have the time to really pay attention as much.

For one thing, I was sad about a few things, and another; I just did not have the time to be present in that way. I have been sleep deprived for the last six months as well ha-ha.

But I think I was put in many situations where I just had to consider that as human beings, man, we are all that we each really have.

I have been put in many situations with a patient where – against my natural inclination to be aloof with people I am not close to – I have just had to be kind. I just had to be the one to show some compassion to them. Especially when you are sharing hard news.

I really cannot believe I have become someone who cannot stand to see my patients cry. I am such a mumu for that, really.

• I learnt about myself:

Here’s another fun thing: I am more adaptable than I thought.

Maybe that shouldn’t come as such a surprise to me. I am Nigerian, after all. We are known to bend and adapt to anything – for better or worse – and I got to see that in action.

I am not sure it is something that I intend to continue with. It might just be the mentality that all of this adaptation will expire after my one year is up that motivated me. But I found myself doing a lot more than I thought I would do.

And I only wanted to do so much so as to protect my physical health. Adapting to stress is not a very good thing. This adaptability, is something I intend to curb. I am fully committed to being a soft girl. And I want to find a very soft girl specialty that will encourage this.

• About Art

It will wait for you.

There is this odd anxiety I have always had about being away from my creative work for too long. That if I stayed away for prolonged periods, I would become rusty. I would forget how to organize a story into a solid, cohesive piece.

This one year has been one of the hardest in maintaining consistency. I have found it hard to even squeeze out an hour out of my days. I often come home either physically tired, or just emotionally spent from having to deal with so many people over an eight-hour period. That silence, that space within my own self – as Virginia Woolf described it a room of one’s own – has been hard to find.

Or even when I found it, hard to maintain. To go back to consistently.

Yet, I have often found that the art always waits for me like a friend. It is kind. I can always pick up where I left off, even if it is weeks later. It was very humbling.

CREATING A BALANCE

WHAT EVEN IS THAT?

Ha-ha.

When I was a student and I hadn’t decided to take my writing seriously, I was always amazed at the amount of free time I had as a student. I was told before entering Uni that medical students never had time to do anything except read.

Reader, I had a LOT of time to do more than just read.

Now, I do not.

Well, I do not that I'm done with housejob

But then, I really did not.

Even when I was combining studying and creative writing together as I student, I still had a lot of free time on my hands. And I mostly used it to hang out with friends.

Those were the times.

I am sure when all of the dust of this internship year settles, I will have the time to figure out how to balance my career, with my other career.

And the rest of my life.

Right now, I am letting out this sigh of relief knowing that it is finally, and peacefully over.

WHAT IS NEXT?

I have decided to ignore this question when it comes to the BIG what is next

But as far as this blog goes, I am looking forward to having a lot more time to write, to post, to promote some new pieces.

Given that there’s only three months left in this year, I am super excited to just push out at least six before the year ends.

To make up for the three months of silence in the first quarter of this year.

And how about you?

How has the past year been for you?

Let me know in the comments dear friend.