I am awake gone 2am.  This is horrific. I love twilight shifts, bar the fact that it means you don’t get any evening, because we start our shift at 4pm and finish at midnight. I normally go to sleep between 11pm and midnight, so in theory my day isn’t that different from a normal 9-5 (not that I have done a 9-5 in the last 4 months but I digress!) but when I get home from a shift of neither Accidents nor Emergencies I cannot sleep immediately. And like today, no adrenaline required at all for what I saw today, in fact, I think I admitted only one patient… and a fractured neck of femur is pretty no-brainer.

I feel like writing something about the fact that I only have 15 emergency shifts left but right now, I really need to attempt to sleep. Otherwise when my alarm goes off at 9:30am, once again, I will remain in my warm beautiful bed until noon.

Not what I am right now, and not exactly what I definitely will be come August 2008.  But it certainly feels that way. At the end of January I applied for medical training jobs, medical as in to be a Physician as opposed to a Surgeon or Radiologist.  I was on nights in the Emergency Department at the time, working hard and sleeping even less due to having to fill in the forms.  I had a meeting with one of my previous Consultants who analyzed the form with me and suggested some changes.

They were all sent off and I forgot about it. Until a friend received an email saying she had an interview for one of the jobs I’d applied for, guess I hadn’t been good enough for that one.  And then I found out the job I REALLY wanted (in the area where my boyfriend lives and works) had made offers for interviews…

Two rejection emails later and it’s becoming a worry.  Apparently my CV isn’t sparkly enough to get me a medical training job.  Certainly my colleagues and patients would (I’d hope) say otherwise.

But what these places see is whether you have presented at a national meeting or completed multiple academic posts.  They don’t see you managing an acute LVF with oxygen saturations of 89% despite GTN and an hour of CPAP.  They don’t see your knowledge possessed when caring for a 13 year old asthmatic and their worried mother.   And they certainly don’t hear the 87 year old lady with a broken hip tell her daughter what a nice doctor you are.

None of that seems to matter anymore… and that’s why we stop believing in medicine, why last week I thought giving up was the best answer.

But then I remember the faces of my patients when they can catch a breath again after my treatment, when their families say “thank you Doctor, for everything you’ve done” (after I’d thrombolysed my first MI!) and even when you don’t win the battle with pathophysiology (and sometimes just physiology in the old) and then I remember the actual reasons I studied medicine and got to where I am today.

I did this not to impress someone who sees me as a faceless application form but for those who see and meet me everyday.

Another crappy attempt at a blog by myself…. Maybe I will actually do some updating, I used to find the whole blogging thing as a great relief and feel that at the moment, I need some of that. Oh, and eventually I will edit the CSS and do something myself