What’s your dream job?
If we are going on true fantasy here, my perfect job would be “psychiatrist.” This is because I don’t want to talk to you about your problems. I want to manage your meds and let you verbally vomit all over someone else. 😉 However, I don’t think I would have done very well in medical school since I had trouble in high school chemistry. So, if I really wanted to, I could get an MSW or an LPC and indeed let you verbally vomit all over me, but I can’t think of a job I would dislike more. It’s not because people have problems.
It’s that I tend to take on everyone else’s problems as my own, and I think I would burn out easily. This wouldn’t be the case if I was a psychiatrist, because those are 15 minute appointments just like every other specialty. I like talking about diagnoses, protocols, etc. because I recognize patterns. I know the different classes of crazy meds and what they do, generally because I’ve been on it at one time or another.
Even if I went back to school to become a pychiatrist, I know that in some ways, I wouldn’t be happy because there are drawbacks to every job. I wouldn’t like working for Kaiser or any other managed care group. I wouldn’t like fighting insurance companies because generic makes my patient throw up all over the floor and brand doesn’t.
I also wouldn’t like that in today’s climate, my advice would mean as much as the ingredients on a cereal box. People go to the doctor differently now. I think that drug commercials being on TV has led to this. You spend years in medical school, internship, and residency only to find that Karen who looks at WebMD all day has “more answers than you.” I am all for being an advocate for your own health. I draw the line at telling my doctors what they should prescribe for me. I feel like you need a degree for that?
No, Karen sees something on TV that she just has to try and if she throws a fit in the exam room, there are too many doctors who can’t be arsed to listen to it and think, “well, it probably won’t kill her.” I think what I really mean is that I would have liked to be a psychiatrist in the 80s and 90s, before everyone with the IQ of bean dip decided they needed to be on the Internet.
I do not know what it would be like to go to medical school in today’s climate, either, because they don’t do much to prepare you for running your own practice. I’d probably end up working for a hospital just so I didn’t have to make ends meet all on my own. I think that med students are better able to advocate for themselves when they get tired, but that’s relatively new. Many, many interns and residents think you should learn like they did, and they are not fond of “the new rules.”
The thing is, the doctors aren’t happy, either. It’s like working in a kitchen- you don’t leave when the restaurant closes, you leave when everything is done for the night… you can’t leave anything in process. While the hospital doesn’t close, there’s lots of both up and downtime. For a doctor, all this translates into the limit of hours you can work…….. being on shift for 11.5 hours and having someone code. Are you going to take your break or take care of your patient?
Hospitals in large part haven’t changed since the 70s. Michael Chrichton wrote a great non-fiction book about it called “Five Patients,” in which he explains the ideas I’m talking to you about now in detail…. it’s a short book, though. If you’re interested or if you know someone going to med school, I’d recommend it to you or as a gift. It’s gritty and real, and though I don’t remember the other four, Peter Luchesi stayed with me.
But if I jump out of fantasyland, I think I already have the skillset I need to launch me into a more well-respected writer. I don’t know that I want to put energy into a different basket than that.
But whatever job I write about, perfect or not, that’s the point. The real job is not the doing, but the remembering…. and I have that covered no matter the subject.
Even medicine.
Stories That Are All True 