Q: WHY DON'T YOU STOP WHINING AND JUST GET A FREAKIN JOB ALREADY?
A: I have come to the sad realization, that, despite almost 10 years of higher education, I am qualified for very little. A medical degree without board eligibility/certification has limited utility--my best bets would be things like consulting, law, or business. Unfortunately, I have the business sense of an absent-minded monkey. On crack. I won't take them completely off the table yet, but I'm not sure that pursuing those lines of work would make me less miserable than I was as a resident. The other fields I'm interested in have absolutely nothing to do with medicine and, as such, I have absolutely no training or experience in them. This makes it infinitely harder to break in to those areas, but I'm trying.
Q: HOW COULD YOU QUIT A JOB WHERE YOU GET TO SAVE LIVES EVERYDAY?
A: Wow. In retrospect, the furiously adamant questions thing was not such a great idea. Anyway, it wasn't the life-saving part that I abhorred (although I generally tend to think of it as "trying not to kill anyone" as opposed to "saving lives"). There were, and remain, many aspects of the practice of medicine (and surgery in particular) that I love and miss. In the end, I think it was a fundamental incompatibility of the culture of residency and certain of my personality traits that did me in. I wish that I could have been happy as a physician, but, all things considered, you only live once, so the pursuit of happiness should be priority one. Unless you're a sociopathic serial killer who derives joy from harming others. In which case, pursuit of mental help should be priority one.Q: WHY DON'T YOU POST YOUR REAL NAME, OR YOUR PICTURE, OR WHERE YOU USED TO WORK?
A: So my shame is my own. No, seriously. Well, at least while my departure from residency is recent, my anonymity protects my prior place of work. I sometimes (or most of the time) have some not very nice things to say about medicine and residency, but the vast majority of them are not specific to my former program in particular. I'd rather that my comments be construed in a general context and not as personal attacks on people or places I've encountered (except where specified).==== more questions to come when there are actually readers of this blog ====
