The bonsai doctor

Medicine sets you off-kilter from the rest of the world. Sometimes that's cool, like when you don't have to line up at the grocery store on Tuesday at 10 a.m. because that's your day off and everyone else is at work. Or when you don't have to fly out for vacation on a Friday night like the rest of the world. But it wears after a while. It first hit me on my obstetrics rotation in medical school. It's summer and I'm spending every living minute at work, I realized as I drove home. This is not how I thought I'd spend my glamorous 20s. I compensated by blasting my music on the ride home (Ricky Martin, for my sins). Read: Happier at any size I'm lucky. My med school was only a seven-hour drive away from my parents. My boyfriend moved in with me during med school and became my husband. I didn't have to live half a world away from my family of origin, my lover, my children or my friends. Once I graduated, I enjoyed doing locums in northern Quebec and Ontario...until we started trying to have kids. Not so easy if you're in different provinces. So I switched to working in local community hospitals. I picked up more shifts in the summer, when more senior doctors wanted time off, and considered it a good trade. When we had a baby (yay!), I didn't mind working weekends because I wanted to be with my son. Didn't matter what day of the week. Once my son started school, though, I needed evenings and weekends free to see him. Child care became a huge wrangle—not expensive in a rural area, but hard to obtain—especially after hours—and not available on weekends. My husband worked in Quebec, and more than once, I forgot to ask for Family Day or the August civic holiday off. Not because we didn't celebrate it, but it wasn't a holiday in Quebec so he'd have to work, but my Ontario babysitter couldn't look after him either. Oops. Read: Who made you? The downside of having a different schedule from most of the world began to rub. I notice this more now that I cut my ER shifts. My son commented first. "You work a lot less. A LOT less." It felt good to see my children again, and not always rush around. I started sleeping better at night. I'd thought I was a terrible sleeper. It turned out stress and shift work made me wake up with palpitations at 3 a.m., but now I can and do hit the pillow at night and wake up after seven or eight hours, completely refreshed. And if I don't, well, I can take a nap later. No big deal. I attended two holiday parties. "I haven't seen you in five years, and now I've seen you twice in a week. I like it!" said one of my colleagues. I may actually send out holiday cards this year. I used to, sort of. I had one friend who sent them religiously, so I tried to as well. Everyone else was hit and miss. Often I'd send them a card only if they sent me one, and I'd rip off their address label and paste it in the TO section of my envelope. One year I did send them super early, in September, because I'd spent a fortune on author photos with Jordan Matter. He'd thrown in a family picture and I wanted to get my money's worth. But this year? Maybe I'll manage. Most of all, I'm relaxing. I'm eating pancakes with maple syrup. I'm reading books. I'm writing books. I'm walking my dogs. I'm working online up to five days a week with the "Early Risers" group from Alberta (this week, I snuck in another workout with "Fifty Shades of Slay"). I say this not to brag, but to recognize that training and practicing medicine twists your life and schedule so much. It can be exhilarating and beautiful but very constrained, like a bonsai tree forced to fit into a tiny pot. As the year draws to a close, maybe it's time to reflect on the sacrifices you've made and how you can set down new roots in 2023. What do you think?

The bonsai doctor

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