The Noble Masochist

I’ve worked straight through a thirty hour call more than once, not sitting down, not passing wet or dry over my lips. It is often simply too busy to take even a moment to have your supper. One may be caught up in theatre and once you leave there, go straight on to casualties where you have a backlog of six patients needing to be seen. The first chance to catch one’s breath may be at 3am, by which time you have a dehydration headache and hypoglycaemic dizziness.

Were you to ask a group of doctors whether their own stomachs take precedence over seeing a sick patient, ninety percent of them will most certainly postpone their own needs and go to sort out the patient. Surely this is what is expected of us. We signed up for a life in medicine and that means that we’ll get up on the coldest night of winter and drive through a rain storm to get to hospital if needs be.

I’m not complaining. There's a small pocket of secret pride in my heart knowing that I’ll stay in theatre until the end of the list, even though I’m post-call and can’t feel my feet anymore after traipsing about on them over the previous day and night without sitting once.

I could leave a couple of stable patients waiting to take a supper break but I expect ‘better’ of myself and would just feel guilty while not attending to them. I’ll jump on a patient’s chest to start CPR even when dressed in a designers beige coat, getting blood stains on it, because there’s an immediate task needing my particular attention.

Could it be an elevated sense of my self-worth, my worth as a doctor that makes me fore go my own basic needs? At my varsity's final graduation ceremony, one of the top dogs in management said that our families and we should stop complaining that we are sent into particularly dangerous squatter camps to visit the clinics there. Some of my classmates had reported being high jacked and suffering intimidation on those trips. The official’s view was that we have signed on to do medicine and should know that going to these dangerous areas was part of the course. Moreover, being in such testing situations would make us better doctors. Have I been brain washed to set my own health and well-being aside for my job? Do you do the same or is the better doctor the one who keeps himself mentally and physically healthy so he may draw on his own strengths when faced with taxing situations at work?

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