I want to be a doctor because (taking off the golden handcuffs)

Quiz time!I want to be a doctor so I canA) Help peopleB) Earn a good livingC) Garner respectD) Do cool thingsE) Bzzzt. I don’t want to doctor no moreWhen I applied to medical school, a doctor asked a filled auditorium, “Grocery store clerks help people. Why do you want to be a doctor?”That stymied me. How could I explain this yearning in my heart? This feeling that I would do anything, anything to enter this profession and devote myself to aiding the sick and preventing health problems?“It’s hard to explain a calling, isn’t it?” my classmate, Antonietta Chiella, replied sympathetically as we sat outside our anatomy lockers in our first few months of med school.It really is. I felt undaunted by the article posted in the waiting room of the family doctor I shadowed, even though the article explained how doctors had suffered from the Ontario government’s 10% clawback and its salary cap. I don’t care! I still want to do it! Don’t worry, I’ll throw my body into the breach!Read: Dr. Melissa Yuan-Innes: Dr. BullyNow, I feel like I got in just when the tide was turning.If you want A from the quiz above, you can still help people, but it takes a monumental amount of work when the system doesn’t properly fund family doctors and strangles all of us with paperwork and EMR that may or may not be useless. You can’t run a hospital without nurses. My friend recently told me that CHEO is sending cardiac surgery to Sick Kids’ Hospital, and when I looked it up, it seems like a shortage of perfusionists.For B, do the math. I got into med school when tuition doubled and doubled again, while earnings got frozen, cut and capped. Obligatory medical provincial organizations raise their fees and do nothing for physicians except some splashy campaigns while paying administrators handsome salaries and benefits. The College of Family Physicians of Canada took that a step further by allowing members’ data to be leaked and then not even bothering to inform the membership for 162 days, let alone offer credit card protection.For C, most people do still respect doctors. When I vaccinated the first COVID cohort, I realized that patients in their 80s wore dress shirts and said, “Thank you, doctor,” which was heartwarming. They are also quite nice in my ER, but it only takes one case to upset us all. As one nurse at another hospital said to me, “I just want a shift where I don’t have to tie anyone down.”For D, we do cool things. Medicine has only gotten more impressive. I lay hands on patients who can have quite miraculous outcomes: a multi-multi-MULTI-trauma victim (seriously, the case of my career) who not only survived, but should lead a relatively normal life. A stroke survivor’s family was so grateful that they named our whole team “healthcare heroes” and donated to the hospital foundation in our names. Plus the more accessible happiness of a grateful small child and family.Still, a lot of us feel like E. I’m done. But I can’t get out. I can’t even cut back because then my problems mount and my income becomes unsustainable, as Dr. Nadia Alam explained.So medicine becomes the golden handcuffs, which I first described in 2016. I don’t have any easy answers, but I will report live from the trenches of FIRE (financial independence, retire early). First of all, even if you should objectively be OK with your nest egg and investments, it does not feel good to be caught between inflation and your kids’ school fees, especially when you’re the sole remaining breadwinner.Plus no one had come up with a proper de-accumulation plan for our family. I felt better after speaking my financial consultants, bearing in mind that you’ll get the best returns from investing your own money yourself and minimizing costs, not through using financial advisors. Still, between discussions with them, a lawyer, and an accountant, we were able to highlight important issues for our family like my husband’s dual U.S. citizenship and the possibility of withdrawing from an RRSP early. My own excellent accountant, Ankur Chawla, weighed in with his own knowledge of personal and corporate taxation.I decided that I’d rather keep earning money while my kids are in school. This means I’m checking out other medical options, like becoming a coroner or providing virtual care in Newfoundland.I need to level up in my writing. My light-hearted Young Adult (YA) mystery, The Red Rock Killer, has won multiple accolades, including becoming a finalist for the Killer Nashville Claymore Award for best unpublished juvenile/YA novel and, to my amazement, bestseller R.L. Stine selected it for the International Thriller Writers’ scholarship for a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, Person of Colour). Thanks to Kickstarter, I plan to release Red Rock to the world in deluxe exclusive editions The cool thing about Kickstarter and other crowdfunders is that people around the world can support you for as little as $1. I believe this is the new world. Instead of relying on governments and medical associations and publishers to hold your hand, jump in! Is there something outside conventional healthcare you want to innovate? Scientists crowdfund their research. Is medicine so far behind?Let me know how you’re doing. A, B, C, D, E or F, your own choice. And if you’re jumping or pivoting or retiring or cutting back, how do you shed those golden handcuffs?Dr. Melissa Yuan-Innes is an emergency physician in Alexandria, Ontario and the author of Sugar and Vice.

I want to be a doctor because (taking off the golden handcuffs)

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