Wednesday, April 4, 2007

I'm not bored

I remeber back when I took two months off after finishing fellowship and then realized that that would mean two months without a paycheck so I agreed to work several nights at the hospital in Chicago to supplement my income. I felt like I wasn't really working and I had all of this free time, but when I actually filled out the stuff to get paid I realized I had averaged around 50 hours a week. It hit me in that moment how crazy my life and job were. I mean really who works 50 hours a week and thinks that they aren't "really working"; however, the truth of the matter was that was less than half as much as I had been averaging for the past 6 years so really the new found free time was huge. Unfortunately, that was a brief sojourn into working what most people would call normal number of hours for a full time job, I have sense returned to working on average 60-100 hours a week, better than I was in training, but still a lot.

Therefore, I guess it should come as no surprise to me that everyone keeps asking me if I am bored since I haven't been working full time for over 5 months. My standard answer is that managing complex healthcare issues really is a full time job and really that is true. I spend about three hours everyday getting to and from radiation (7 down, 21 to go- for those keeping track), then another 1-2 hours doing my physical therapy exercises or going to physical therapy. Then there is the obligate resting period that the above activities require of me and dealing with insurance which is really a whole other post in and of itself. I am left with some time to do things I enjoy and really no time to get bored. However, I have lately been wandering how I will prepare myself to go back to working the type of hours that my job requires. It currently is a mystery, but maybe as I get better I will find myself wanting to go back. Still my current inability to stand for more than 3-5 minutes rules out my being able to work right now even if I was bored, so I have time to figure it out.

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