Diary of a Stressed Medic: Part 2

I get off the phone with L and breathe a sigh of relief. At least that’s done.

Now I need a GP appointment.

I call and get an emergency on the day telephone consultation. At this point I am desperate for an empathetic voice on the other side of the phone. Surely, they have gone through similar times, or surely, they’ve seen other doctors go through similar times.

Sadly, this was not the telephone conversation that was going to bring comfort to me.

My brain was mush. I think it was shock I was actually doing this, and it couldn’t conjure up any thoughts. Imagine then the difficulty when the GP rattles through a depression screen, that I myself know only too well from my clinical practice:
“Are you eating?” “Yes, well I am now, but after a bad shift, no.”
“Have you lost weight?” “No…I don’t think so?” Honestly, I wouldn’t even have noticed.
“Have you had thoughts of self-harm” “Um, no…I don’t know… after my shifts I often am so stressed, my mind racing 100 miles an hour with anxieties and worries from the day and patients I’ve seen, that I hope I crash my car just for a way out of this…are those thoughts of self-harm?”
“Have you got support?” “Yes, I’ve got my boyfriend and my family”
“Has this caused issues in your relationship?” “No.” A blatant lie, but in the moment, I didn’t even register it was a lie. My brain hasn’t had time to process the last 2 months and it is only now I am beginning to slowly process the magnitude of the strain it has put on myself and my loved ones.
“Have you been sleeping?” “No”. At this point I say no just to tick any box in the checklist, to convey that I am not a fraud, and I am in fact struggling.
She follows up this answer with – “Ok well we can prescribe something for that.”
She says she thinks I need a week off work for now, but that she will book me in for a face to face with another GP to assess further.

Unfortunately, the inquiry on how I am feeling doesn’t stop there. A company calls me that afternoon. They tell me they contact all NHS workers when they go off sick, and have some routine questions for me.
“On a scale of 1-100 how motivated are you to get back to work?”
“On a scale of 1-100 how confident are you that you’ll return to work in the next 4 weeks?”
“Are you managing to do your housework?”
“Are you able to motivate yourself?”
It goes on.

My sixth, and final, phone call that day, finally brought the empathy and understanding I was so desperate for. I had self-referred to occupational health the day before calling in sick and they were calling for an initial assessment. The man I spoke with listened to me and allowed me to speak freely about how I have been feeling and what had been going on. By doing that he began to help me process it all.
I told him that I just felt like a rubbish doctor, that I didn’t know anything, and never knew what to do.
“Sounds like you’re experiencing a lot of negative thinking”.
I can’t tell you how therapeutic it was to hear that. Oh – you think that that’s negative thinking? This thing that I am experiencing…it has a name?
Because to me, that is just reality, that is truth. I think I am useless because I am useless. But here you are, telling me that this could be something else. In fact, this could be something that has its own name, its own label, because it is a recognised symptom, that perhaps other people experience too?

He told me to take it easy and to not be hard on myself. Words I really needed to hear. I was not in a place to tell myself that. I needed someone else to give me permission to be gentle on myself. As a doctor I am used to looking after others, yet here I am finding it so hard to give myself permission to look after myself.

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