It happens to be our anniversary next week and my wife and I decided on a short and early road trip to celebrate. About an hour out of Melbourne is a place called Healesville and it was just amazing to see the shades of Autumn in full swing.
It occurred to both of us that we pack out vacations with distant travels but forget to just drive for an hour and enjoy the peace and quiet that so very close. At the end of the day, an hour is basically the same as driving home in peak hour after all.
A few other things:
- Realised I had spent most of last week eating out and it showed when I checked in with my personal trainer
- Finished a bunch of paperwork both with life admin and getting things sorted for the US. It was nice to tick things off the to-do list, but realised it’ pretty unsatisfying to just be immersed in “busywork”
- ended up using ChatGPT and some basic python knowledge to make a little tool for work. This was the opposite: hours spent hitting my head against a wall since I hadn’t coded in so long, but it was satisfying to be able to automate something…
Now being in anaesthetics, patient contact/follow-up isn’t usually that high in our professional lives. Of course, we have to evaluate and give an anaesthetic to a person and that person needs to history explored and questions answered prior giving the keys to their body over to us.
But that level of conversation is almost automatic and an exercise in experienced summary: after tens of thousands episodes of care, you get to know just the right question to ask to get precisely the answer you’re after to tweak your plans.
That’s great for efficiency, but it’s not the best for knowing your patients. This week, I had a request about some medications from a patient prior to their operation. Now, I’m not a fan of calling people prior if I can help it given I almost always have time to call at odd moments of the day or after hours and it turns into a cycle of phone tag.
This time, it was none of that and a patient very engaged and informed on their health answered. It was one of the most efficient chats in terms of providing them with a plan of what to do. This in itself was a great experience, but as the patient said ” I didn’t have the anaesthetist call last time. It’s really put my mind at ease and I look forward to meeting you before the operation”.
Now the patient sounded just fine and calm, but I tend to forget that these are major days for most people require quite an interruption to their normal lives. I’m glad our brief chat while I was rushing from 1 hospital to the next could have such an impact. And I suppose it’s nice to have a tiny bit of validation/feedback that what we do matters. In one sense, of course it does: it’s healthcare. But on the other, we’re usually a cog in the machine to enable other things to happen and don’t get seen by the general public much.
It was a small thing, but it did make me happy to be able to connect to that patient. It’s sometimes the smallest things that provide the most satisfaction…