People choose to study medicine for all sorts of reasons. A lifelong dream. Family expectations. Academic ability coupled with a lack of any better idea at seventeen.
Whatever the motivation to go to medical school, the reality of working as a doctor is often different to expected. Not necessarily better or worse, just different.
Many doctors spend the better part of a decade (or more) working towards consultant life, only to get their ticket and wonder if they ever honestly wanted it in the first place.
For many doctors I speak to, they share with me that actually they might have wanted to do something entirely different – art, teaching, engineering, [insert any other profession here], but for a variety of reasons the medical path was chosen.
Then, med school goes past in a blur and you pop out as an intern – off one treadmill and onto another. Resident years pass by and the pressure to sign up to training can feel inescapable. More years pass going from one job to another, one speciality to another, through study and exams until boom, you’re a consultant.
I often think these early years are a bit like holding your breath and swimming under water. Setting off at the edge of the pool and kicking furiously in a direction. The hope is that when you finally come up for air, after all the “training” is done, that you are in the place you want to be. The place you set out to be. And that that place looks and feels like you thought it would.
Often though, that is not the reality. Surfacing for air, new consultants look around and think shit – this is not what I expected. I might have signed up for this at the start, but I’m not so sure now. All the doubt along the way had been put to the side because really, who’s got time for that? The treadmill keeps moving, doctors keep running.
When the exams are over it can feel like….a whole heap of nothing. You know that moment when you are walking along the travelator at the airport – feeling like you’re walking at lightning speed and then everything slows down when you get off? That’s a bit like what finishing training (both times) felt like for me.
The expectation is that happiness will suddenly arrive when training ends, but for many doctors it doesn’t. It feels more like a fizzle than a boom. Life continues and the next treadmill of consultant life has already begun. The reality of all this can hit like a smack to the face, or a slow deflation of your inner energy. This is your career for the next few decades – gulp.
And that’s when the reflection comes in. “Did I even want this in the first place”? “Did I actually do medical school for me or for my parents”? “Is this speciality the one I genuinely enjoy, or the one that everyone else was doing”? “If I change now will that be a failure”? “Have I wasted the best part of my twenties and thirties going in the wrong direction”?
If only people talked about it openly, honestly. Normalising it instead of doubling down on the expectations to say all is well.
It’s ok to question. It’s ok to doubt. It doesn’t mean that you are the problem. It means that you are human. So often though, these doubts turn inward – am I good enough? Am I the imposter here? Everyone else is thriving, why am I only surviving?
Some of these questions will settle with time. Some will settle with confiding in close supports. Some will settle with professional support in the form of coaching or psychology. And if they don’t settle, please, don’t panic.
Doctors have so many transferable skills. Transferable into other specialities, other areas of health, or out into the big wide world beyond healthcare.
So ask yourself – “who’s life is it anyway”? If whatever you are doing isn’t working for you, change it. Nothing you have done so far is wasted, everything is building towards the next step.
We cannot go forward in life without our past and sometimes we can’t see that the ups and downs, the unexpected curve balls, the random side steps, were all taking us exactly where we needed to go.
This is your life, not your CV. Medicine can be part of your story without being all of it. So if the path you’re on no longer fits, you are allowed to choose a different one.
