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It started with a night in the ER
Waking up in the on-call room
The journey to the moment I ‘wasted’ my medical degree starts with one night in the ER.
I was sitting in the emergency room at 2:45 AM. I had just woken up an hour ago with a message on my phone that read: John Smith, 64, patient number: XXXX XXX, came in 20 minutes ago with severe abdominal pain, need you in the ER now.
One hour ago, in my little on-call room, I had turned on the computer, quickly reading through the patient file, writing down important notes before sprinting down 4 flights of stairs and down two corridors. The hospital was surprisingly quiet during the night. Until I opened double ER doors with my badge and entered into a bustle of activity, monitors beeping, and instructions being dictated.
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Sprinting to the ER
I found my patient and spent the next half hour talking to him and his wife about what was going on. Afterwards, I had compiled all my data into a coherent message before I called my superior down to sign off on diagnosis and treatment.
And that’s how I found myself at 2:45AM on a swirly chair in the corner of a nurses station talking to my senior resident about my findings. I was lucky, the one with me tonight wasn’t that scary. She was actually pretty nice. We went through my differential and talked about next steps. Time passed on. I couldn’t help but think about my pillow upstairs.
At 3:30 AM, she said, “Hey I’m going to go grab a coffee from the vending machine, you want one?”
A slap in the face
And that’s when it happened.
It was like a slap and one of those zoom-out moments you see on movies where the person is flying backwards.
It was the moment when I realized, this isn’t normal.
It’s 3:30 AM, we should not be drinking coffee. We should not think that it is normal to power through, through exhaustion, no sleep, and belittle others who struggle with this gruesome pace.
Backstory: A journey through medicine
Getting to medical school, is an incredibly hard journey, like many other professions, like anything in academia leading up to and including a Ph.D., lawyer, dentist, pharmacist, high-end corporate, and many more.
The lesson we learn
And throughout all of it, the message is clear, “It sucks now, and it is what it is. Pull up your socks, get tougher, stick it out, work harder, and get through it.”
We quickly learn that it’s not okay to appear tired. We learn that we need to be tougher, and that if we don’t feel it, something is wrong with us.
Amongst all of this powering through for so many years, we often forget to ask ourselves, do I still want to do this? Is this what makes me happier than anything in the world?
Does this make me happier than anything in the world?
That night in the ER, I knew my answer. And it was, No. This doesn’t make me happier than anything in the world. I loved my time with that patient, I loved working through the patient case like it’s a puzzle and I’m the detective whose job it is to figure out what is going on beneath the surface of his skin. I even loved the adrenaline rush of running to a patient, knowing I can help them, which is why I got into medicine in the first place, to help people.
So I remember thinking to myself, why isn’t it enough?
And sometimes, there is no answer. Just like when you are in a relationship with the perfect person, who you love so much, and yet it’s not right. It’s not enough.
That’s the same as it was for me in medicine.
When I decided to leave medicine
It wasn’t that night that I decided not to do medicine. That night, I decided yet again to ignore that nudge from the universe. I decided it would be a shame if I wasted my medical degree when I had already put so much time and effort in.
And it cost me another 3 years of my life. It was actually 3 years after that night that I allowed myself to admit that it’s not right, that I can’t spend the rest of my life doing something that I have a love/hate relationship with. A relationship that was slowly destroying my mental health and my happiness.
Why I ‘wasted’ my medical degree
I wanted to be a doctor since I was a kid and I put a lot of time and effort to make it happen. So I never thought I would become a coach and that I would write an article titled: The Surprising Reason I ‘Wasted’ My Medical Degree.
However, we only have a short amount of time on Earth. And as the years go by, time speeds up, and it goes by so quickly.
I decided I was going to spend that time doing something that I have only a love relationship with. Something that lights me up every time I sit down to do it. Something that when I realized what it was felt like my whole life has been leading up to that point. A dream that makes the minutes and days fly by because I’m loving every minute of it. A dream that just feels….right.
