Is Everyone in Acute Care Miserable

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usalsfyre

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So I just started blogging, possibly to keep my sanity, and I wrote this. However, I'd like to pose the question of what I wrote to the crowd here. So here goes...

My wife recently lost her job (in medical imaging), and as a result has been staying home with our two children. Despite the job loss, lately she’s been happier than normal. In fact, some days she seems down right giddy. Today she brought up if I had ever thought of changing my career. To what you may ask? Something completely away from medicine. Her reasoning was, I complain about my job every day I come home. Yet, I’m mostly satisfied (granted EMS is not where I want to end up) and can’t say I really hate coming to work. There’s nights I’d rather stay home, sure, but it’s not the absolutely dragging myself in tempted to call-in sick I’ve had before at jobs. I come home tired (I can say definitively I hate 24+ hour shifts) and I’m very frustrated with management right now, but I’m not unhappy or dissatisfied with the actual job.

Her comments did get me thinking though. Every person I know in acute care complains about their job. Much of it for the same reasons, stupid management, abusive patients, crappy hours and high workload. Is all of this really just a surrogate for the fact that we wallow around in human misery? If someone encounters our end (acute hospital and out-of-hospital care, i.e., not primary care) of healthcare they are, by definition, having a bad day. Early in my career I was either oblivious or chose to ignore this fact, but for the last two or three years its affected me more and more. Although it’s satisfying to run a complicated call, the realization that someone probably had a life-changing moment so I could get that satisfaction is no longer something I can ignore. This weird dichotomy is something I’m having to learn to process in a new-way, before it didn’t affect me at all. Are we all affected by it? Is that the reason that no one seems to be truly “happy and worry free” in acute-care? Why we all seem to bear some level of burden (and insanity)? Am I just hanging around the wrong people?
 
usalsfyre said:
So I just started blogging, possibly to keep my sanity, and I wrote this. However, I'd like to pose the question of what I wrote to the crowd here. So here goes...

My wife recently lost her job (in medical imaging), and as a result has been staying home with our two children. Despite the job loss, lately she’s been happier than normal. In fact, some days she seems down right giddy. Today she brought up if I had ever thought of changing my career. To what you may ask? Something completely away from medicine. Her reasoning was, I complain about my job every day I come home. Yet, I’m mostly satisfied (granted EMS is not where I want to end up) and can’t say I really hate coming to work. There’s nights I’d rather stay home, sure, but it’s not the absolutely dragging myself in tempted to call-in sick I’ve had before at jobs. I come home tired (I can say definitively I hate 24+ hour shifts) and I’m very frustrated with management right now, but I’m not unhappy or dissatisfied with the actual job.

Her comments did get me thinking though. Every person I know in acute care complains about their job. Much of it for the same reasons, stupid management, abusive patients, crappy hours and high workload. Is all of this really just a surrogate for the fact that we wallow around in human misery? If someone encounters our end (acute hospital and out-of-hospital care, i.e., not primary care) of healthcare they are, by definition, having a bad day. Early in my career I was either oblivious or chose to ignore this fact, but for the last two or three years its affected me more and more. Although it’s satisfying to run a complicated call, the realization that someone probably had a life-changing moment so I could get that satisfaction is no longer something I can ignore. This weird dichotomy is something I’m having to learn to process in a new-way, before it didn’t affect me at all. Are we all affected by it? Is that the reason that no one seems to be truly “happy and worry free” in acute-care? Why we all seem to bear some level of burden (and insanity)? Am I just hanging around the wrong people?
Click to expand...

I'm extremely happy in acute care, but that is because it is always where I wanted to be. Yeah, it can be pretty bad at times, like situations where I have to explain to a family member that their loved one, even though they are tracking, and look like they are with us, are really in a coma, or times whenever I have to see another young life ended over tragedies such as drinking and driving, drug abuse, etc. However, all in all, I am for the most part very happy. Then again, I don't have near as many years as you do. Perhaps one day, I might feel the same. I hope, for my sake that I am still enthusiastic about my role in Acute care and trauma as I am now, 20 years down the road.

If all else fails, I will just focus on my back up plan of marrying a rich sugar momma.

P.S. Send me a link to your blog via PM, I will show you some link love in the "Our Friends" section of the podcast page.
 
The years I spent running calls... never got me all that down. While at times I may have grumbled a bit here or there about management or whatever, I never got up every morning dreading going to work. Why? Work was fun. I liked what I was doing, I liked the people I worked with. I liked interacting with patients. I resigned myself to the knowledge that I was working with people that were having their "bad day." Them having a bad day didn't mean that I had to have one too. My job was to try to help make their bad day better. Sometimes their last bad day meant trying to make the family's bad day better.

I think people become miserable in their jobs when the no longer find joy in what they do. They define themselves by what they do, not by who they are. I am by nature, a helper and a teacher. Paramedic is one way I express that.
 
A matter of degrees.

Every job entails duties and people who/which are at a tangent from the part of the job you wanted to do. EG: you become a paramedic to save lives, but you wind up depending as much time doing inter-facility transfers, paperwork for billing, and washing the ambulance, as rescuing people.
Some places and some positions are at a higher degree of tangent. Once the tangent reaches 180 degrees, you either change paradiagms, or become terminally dissatisfied.
Also, people with problem-solving personalities will focus on what needs to be fixed, not what's going well, and as a result we whine and complain a lot.
 
medicRob, I bet your not that far behind me, geez I haven't been doing this THAT long...

Rereading my post I realized I came off as a little bit of a burnout. That's not really what I was trying to convey. Like I said, I still enjoy my job, I look forward to going in to work. I'm very frustrated with management (and have been at a couple of places now), but I still enjoy providing care. However, I've become much more aware of the "human cost" so to speak that goes along with medicine in the last two years.
 
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