In Which Our Heroine isn't much of a heroine. She's just tired.

I haven't much to say except that I am tired.  I could sleep for days on end and not feel refreshed, I think.  Vacation can't come soon enough.

But why am I so bone-weary?  I work, but not the way residents used to.  (We won't get into how I feel the new duty-hour restrictions ruin my education.)  Yes, I am working nights currently, and thus switching between nocturnal and diurnal lifestyles very few days.  But I have frequent days off, and yet I am still so tired!

It's frustrating.  I want to feel refreshed and eager to meet the day. But what I actually crave is to curl up in bed and sleep.  I feel emotionally drained as well.  That's multifactorial -- part of the mixed blessing of caring for my patients, and partly related to Operation Baby with its cycle of pain, worry, despair, and hope.

Yet sleep is no escape from infertility.  Last night I dreamt that they told me our new surrogate couldn't be the surrogate because her mother had just ruptured a cerebral aneurysm and so had her brother so she needed time to her family.  Of course Mama Phyll and Mama reinterpreted the dreams positively for me.  But to me it means I am clearly stressed.

And what if medicine isn't right for me?  I know so much less than my colleagues and feel too exhausted to improve myself through reading.  I get incredibly anxious every time I have to see a new patient.  Clinic doubles my systolic blood pressure.  I am generally more stressed when I "do" medicine than when I "do" books.

What if I am supposed to be a professor of literature?

I know I was influenced by Mama.  It's not news that I wanted to be like her and that I wanted to please her.  But I made a conscious decision to pursue medicine even knowing this.  I chose medicine to help people.  Literature is wonderful, and I am happiest and most comfortable with my head in a book, but it doesn't help people in the same way.

So where does this leave me?  In whom do I confide?  Do I even confide in anyone?  I suppose as a "married woman" I should be confiding in my husband.  But he thinks he works far harder than I, and he is completely unsympathetic.  (Plus he doesn't understand, as nobody can who hasn't been a resident.)  I can't confide in Mama because she can't imagine anything better than medicine.  She doesn't have an unenthusiastic cell in her body.

So we will see.  One day at a time, I guess.  And residency is finite.

I just hope I want to be a doctor at the end.