Burnout by Mohammad A. Shahab (guest writer)
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| Photo-credit: Saniya Kamal, AKU MBBS '18 |
Medicine used to hold that for me. It would tantalise me. It would leave just enough of an aftertaste in my mouth to leave me wanting more. I was the one who would arrive in the clinics before the doors were unlocked. I was the one who’d stand for hours in Operating Rooms, drinking in the sights. When the floors were slick with blood, my own blood would be racing. But all love is meant to wither away. Not all Attendings are bad. But the many that are, are rotten to the core. Each time an Attending passes a snide comment, each time they yell at me, each time they’re rude or unreasonable, the thought ‘I will not be this way, I will not become this’ runs through my mind. Somehow, somewhere, your emotions about the Attendings get entangled with your emotions about the field they work in. I will never work in ENT. I will never work in Paediatrics. I will never work in Gastroenterology. Unworthy Attendings make for unworthy fields. Eventually, when your list of unwanted fields grows longer and longer, you realise that you’ve fallen out of love with Medicine. It’s too much pain, too much disrespect to deal with. As a junior of mine recently put it, ‘Medicine isn’t HARD. It’s pretty easy. It’s these damned consultants that make it hard.’ Eventually, when it grows to be too much, you learn to numb yourself. You disengage the gears and coast on neutral. You learn to be dead inside.
One day during rounds we walked into a
Special Care Unit. There was a Code going on. A team of gowned residents and
nurses were huddled around a bed. A man was pumping the patient’s chest, doing
CPR. I glanced at the bed. She had a belly like a football. Pregnant, almost to
term. My mind flashed back to my ER Attending, a lovely bald moustachioed man,
telling us that CPR and ACLS has a less than one percentage chance of actually working.
We were quickly ushered outside the unit, since medical students are barely
human and therefore treated by Residents with the contempt reserved for stray
dogs and their offerings. The relatives were crying outside the door, having
being told. I walked to the counter. And I felt nothing. Just an empty space
where the feeling should have been. No sadness. No sorrow for the loss of life.
Just nothing. An absence. A void.
At first, you weave left and right,
keeping your fists up and guarding against any stray emotion you may feel. I
feel the itch, my blood sings for it. But I deny the impulse. Because it hurts
too much, that road it will take me down. That, you see, is burnout.
CREDITS:
About the Author: Mohammad Ali Shahab, AKU MBBS class of 2016, is interested in pursuing a career in ophthalmology.
About the Reviewer / Editor: Dr. Kanwal Nayani, AKU MBBS Class of 2015, is currently working at AKU as a Research Associate. She is interested in pursuing a career in Pediatrics.
Editorial Note: This is from a series collected as part of the Narrative Medicine Workshop at AKU on January 20th, 2016. The editorial work was performed by the Writers’ Guild, an interest group at AKU, with the purpose to promote love of reflective reading and writing, within and outside of AKU.
DISCLAIMER: Copyright belongs to the author. This blog cannot be held responsible for events bearing overt resemblance to any actual occurrences.
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