(no subject)
Hi everyone! It's been… a while.
I just got back from spending a year in England, which was amazing and interesting and exhausting and mostly everything I'd hoped for. I'd been planning to post regularly while I'm over there, but obviously that didn't happen-at first because I was busy running around London having the time of my life, and then because, starting November or so, I started sliding into what turned into a thankfully mild but still pretty fucking unpleasant case of burn-out.
I ended up working in a huge emergency department outside London, which in a lot of ways was a fantastic job. I learned SO MUCH this year. I got to do a lot of things I'd never done before, it was crazy and scary and wild and generally all the things I love about working in emergency medicine, and the coworkers were fantastic.
Unfortunately, the shift system was completely insane. On average we were supposed to work 48 hours a week which I thought sounded slightly unpleasant but doable. The way the rotation actually worked out, I was usually working either a 65 hour week, or a 30 hour week consisting of three ten night hour night shifts. I thought I wasn't that fussed about night shifts-my previous job did 17 hour night shifts with a 3 hour sleep break in the middle, every second day, and I actively liked those-but these night shifts were fucking harrowing beyond all words.
Which meant that it wasn't "a hard 65 hour week and then a relaxing 30 hour week", it was either "Thank god it's not night shift week! Man, why am I so tired when it's not even night shift?" or "It's three am and I want to die and there's five and a half hours of work left."
As if that wasn't bad enough, on the non-night-shift weeks they rotated us between different morning and late shifts every two to three days, so on any given day I might be working anything from an eight to five to an 18:00-02:00. Since it takes me three days to shift my sleep cycle to a new rhythm, eventually I just basically lost the ability to sleep entirely.
Really, it's a bit amazing it took me until November to start going insane. In retrospect, the first symptom of thing being slightly less than okay was probably my sudden obsession with books about mountaineering accidents, which, looking back at it, probably resonated because all of them featured people dragging themselves forwards on sheer willpower while any reasonable person should have just laid down and refused to move ever again.
There's this Reinhold Messner quote I ended up inexplicably obsessed with:
“When I rest I feel utterly lifeless except that my throat burns when I draw breath... I can scarcely go on. No despair, no happiness, no anxiety. I have not lost the mastery of my feelings, there are actually no more feelings. I consist only of will. After each few meters this too fizzles out in unending tiredness. Then I think nothing. I let myself fall, just lie there. For an indefinite time I remain completely irresolute. Then I make a few steps again."
Helpful life tip: if you ever feel like that quote resonates with your daily life, MAYBE TAKE A FUCKING VACATION OR SOMETHING.
Anyway, on that cheerful note, I'm back in Germany, I'm okay, I'm recovered, and I've got two months off to continue recovering and maybe also do a bit of journaling for real this time. And also to backread six months worth of people's LJs because past a certain point I could manage tumblr, which only requires me to mindlessly click on things, but the effort of interacting on LJ was completely beyond me.
I also met some amazing people and did a lot of cool stuff in England, but I'll maybe talk about that in a separate entry because this one turned into kind of a downer.
What have you all been up to? I miss talking to you guys, what's going on in your life? What did I miss?
I just got back from spending a year in England, which was amazing and interesting and exhausting and mostly everything I'd hoped for. I'd been planning to post regularly while I'm over there, but obviously that didn't happen-at first because I was busy running around London having the time of my life, and then because, starting November or so, I started sliding into what turned into a thankfully mild but still pretty fucking unpleasant case of burn-out.
I ended up working in a huge emergency department outside London, which in a lot of ways was a fantastic job. I learned SO MUCH this year. I got to do a lot of things I'd never done before, it was crazy and scary and wild and generally all the things I love about working in emergency medicine, and the coworkers were fantastic.
Unfortunately, the shift system was completely insane. On average we were supposed to work 48 hours a week which I thought sounded slightly unpleasant but doable. The way the rotation actually worked out, I was usually working either a 65 hour week, or a 30 hour week consisting of three ten night hour night shifts. I thought I wasn't that fussed about night shifts-my previous job did 17 hour night shifts with a 3 hour sleep break in the middle, every second day, and I actively liked those-but these night shifts were fucking harrowing beyond all words.
Which meant that it wasn't "a hard 65 hour week and then a relaxing 30 hour week", it was either "Thank god it's not night shift week! Man, why am I so tired when it's not even night shift?" or "It's three am and I want to die and there's five and a half hours of work left."
As if that wasn't bad enough, on the non-night-shift weeks they rotated us between different morning and late shifts every two to three days, so on any given day I might be working anything from an eight to five to an 18:00-02:00. Since it takes me three days to shift my sleep cycle to a new rhythm, eventually I just basically lost the ability to sleep entirely.
Really, it's a bit amazing it took me until November to start going insane. In retrospect, the first symptom of thing being slightly less than okay was probably my sudden obsession with books about mountaineering accidents, which, looking back at it, probably resonated because all of them featured people dragging themselves forwards on sheer willpower while any reasonable person should have just laid down and refused to move ever again.
There's this Reinhold Messner quote I ended up inexplicably obsessed with:
“When I rest I feel utterly lifeless except that my throat burns when I draw breath... I can scarcely go on. No despair, no happiness, no anxiety. I have not lost the mastery of my feelings, there are actually no more feelings. I consist only of will. After each few meters this too fizzles out in unending tiredness. Then I think nothing. I let myself fall, just lie there. For an indefinite time I remain completely irresolute. Then I make a few steps again."
Helpful life tip: if you ever feel like that quote resonates with your daily life, MAYBE TAKE A FUCKING VACATION OR SOMETHING.
Anyway, on that cheerful note, I'm back in Germany, I'm okay, I'm recovered, and I've got two months off to continue recovering and maybe also do a bit of journaling for real this time. And also to backread six months worth of people's LJs because past a certain point I could manage tumblr, which only requires me to mindlessly click on things, but the effort of interacting on LJ was completely beyond me.
I also met some amazing people and did a lot of cool stuff in England, but I'll maybe talk about that in a separate entry because this one turned into kind of a downer.
What have you all been up to? I miss talking to you guys, what's going on in your life? What did I miss?