Bear with me whilst I get up to speed…
I’ve been a bit quiet recently because I got one of the horrid bugs doing the rounds.. I’ve spent 2 weeks poorly not doing much other than coughing and feeling sorry for myself because I was supposed to be having a nice time away for half term. Instead, I was not well enough to even climb the stairs, so definitely none of my usual holiday activities of mountain walking for me…Thankfully I am feeling much better now and thinking about getting back to work next week… but just bear with me whilst I get back up to speed.
One of the things I have noticed over the last couple of weeks is the ridiculous level of guilt that medics tend to carry around with us. Although I’ve been very lucky to only had a short illness, I did spend the first week debating to myself each day whether I was fit enough to work and whether I really was genuinely ‘sick enough’ to call in sick… totally pointlessly as I wasn’t fit enough to get out of bed for several days. I felt bad about having to go to see my GP because of a daft idea that I should magically be able to fix myself because I’m a doctor, right?
And then, as I started to feel a bit better, but still not able to make it up a flight of stairs without coughing and wheezing and being so breathless I couldn’t get through a full sentence, I felt guilty for not being better sooner, for missing work, for letting my patients down, for letting the kids down when I should have been doing fun things with them on my days off at half term…
Now, I have all my coaching skills and I have coached myself through this, or perhaps more accurately I have given myself a bit of a talking to. But, even with all my sensible self-coaching, it is just fascinating to notice how much this conditioning of “we should be strong and carry on, we don’t get sick, we don’t get diagnoses, we give diagnoses to others and look after everyone else” is deeply rooted in the medic mind.
There is a great article in the BMJ ( https://www.bmj.com/content/387/bmj.q1486.full ) this week about when doctors become patients, and how challenging we find being on the other side of the doctor-patient divide. It is much more eloquent than my ramblings, but it is very timely given that winter-illness season is rapidly approaching. Take care of yourselves out there.
