Firstly, what are your thoughts on the subtle change in the images used in the newsletter? Some people suggested having a banner style one so I’m trying it out. Let me know in a literal 2 second survey which you like! Please?!
It’s been about 2 weeks straight of work and today was meant to be my day off. As always, I got dragged in to finish a few cases. It wasn’t all bad as that only took about 3 hrs. The rest of the time, I managed to head out for brunch (proof below), get some work done around the house and even go for a run!
This week also had me get to my limit and implement some decently large changes to my schedule. Firstly, it’s now been 2 weeks straight of work as I mentioned above and also the reason this newsletter is so late: I forgot it was Sunday today! 🤣
Secondly, as mentioned in last weeks newsletter, there have been some intensely challenging cases during my on calls. They were great to be able to tackle and successfully do but there’s just so many that was beginning to feel a bit overwhelming…
The crunch came when I was really not wanting to do another long shift and was psyching myself up to get through this bit by looking forward to my holiday in September. There I was staring at my calendar with a month long holiday imagining what I’d be doing when I accidentally hit “next month” and saw the schedule I’d be returning to
Right then, it was such a visceral reaction from seeing just how crowded it ALREADY was for OCTOBER that I picked up the phone, dropped some more on-calls, called a good friend that I work with to say I could no longer do one of his surgical lists and start cutting back on some of my other work by distributing it through my group of anaesthetists that I work with.
Just imaging the holiday and seeing what I’d come back to was like the straw that broke the camels back. The other thing that probably influenced all this was the rising effects of the pandemic once more. I looked back at my old schedules and they were just as busy as this, but I manged to find a way to get away every 2-3 months. Given the current level of sick leave, that just isn’t going to happen easily. So the only way to fix this is to just have a more sustainable schedule every month.
I’ll probably make some further changes in the future, but for now, I think I’ll keep the changes where they are until after I’ve had some time away to think about things!