Abandonment
Wednesday, April 1, 2009 at 11:37PM If my blog were a child, I would be charged with abandonment. It wasn’t intentional, but I know I haven’t been writing much lately. In the near future, I hope to correct that oversight.
It is not as if I haven’t been writing. I write daily, and have even written a few blog entries that I never finished. Part of the problem has been laziness, part that I have been concentrating on writing projects I never intend to publish online, and part of it is that I have a case of writer’s block. But mostly it is because there have been considerable changes in my life since November, and I have been thinking about how I want to incorporate that into my online persona.
At the end of November, I closed my medical practice and left primary care. Now I work for a hospital in Mississippi, caring for hospitalized patients only. The conversion to hospitalist has simplified my life greatly. Instead of trying to run an office and treat patients in the hospital at the same time, I now spend all my time in the hospital. It means more time off, a little more money, and best of all, a lot less hassle.
For people who have never been in medicine, it is very difficult to describe the tyranny of the pager, and the mountains of paperwork an outpatient clinic generates. In my clinic, I spent easily 20% of my day doing paperwork. Another 10% was spent on the phone dealing with patients in the hospital, admits, discharges, and answering 10 o’clock calls on Friday night from patients whose “emergency” was that they lost their bottle of Vicodin.
I am free of all that now. I get half the pages, and do less than half the paperwork. When I am in the hospital I don’t have to worry about what is going on in the office, and, since I do not have an office, I don’t have to worry about what is going on in the hospital while I am seeing outpatients.
Still, I have some misgivings. Though not enough to ever consider going back.
In the coming months I hope to write a lot more about my experience. I believe there is a extreme need for primary care doctors in this country, and increasingly physicians are turning their backs on traditional primary care, as I have. As a friend of mine once remarked, “In 20 years you won’t be able to find a family doctor in this country who speaks English as a first language.” Which is absolutely true, if trends continue.
Give me time, and I’ll explain.
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