Plain and simple

June 27, 2008 at 10:56 pm | Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Of all the times to get a cold…

I felt it coming on last week, but it was almost as if the cold knew I had too much work to do. So it just hung around in the background until I was done. Either that, or the call night equivalent of my last day on service used up the last bit of resistance my immune system could muster.

I really need to go turn in my pager. And there are probably some forms to sign and whatnot. But honestly, when no one’s depending on me to take care of patients, it’s pretty tough to slog onward when my head feels like it’s about to explode.

On the flip side, however, whatever it’s doing to my larynx makes me sound ten times more authoritative. When I was dictating Tuesday night, I had been making an effort to enunciate because of the cold, and when I replayed the tape to revise something, my voice sounded exactly like Queen Amidala.

Since then I’ve been spending some time calling various programs, looking for a job for next year. I started at the beginning of the alphabet, and immediately ran into the same assumptions that dogged me throughout the match. Namely, that my primary criteria is location rather than quality of training.

How much more clearly can I say it? I am not going to base a career decision on a guy I am neither engaged to nor even dating. And the corollary: I am not going to use some guy’s interest in me to advance my career. Even if I’m interested in return, I don’t want there to be any questions of that nature in anyone’s mind. If that means I have to spend some extra time proving myself, so be it. Or if I have to forgo the relationship altogether, that’s certainly nothing new either.

I just get annoyed when I sense people making assumptions about what I want. Yes, there are choices to be made when the personal and the professional don’t line up nicely. And at some later point, I might be able to strike a balance between the two. But at this point in my training, I simply can’t factor anyone else into the equation, or I risk limiting my options to zero.

A friend of mine in med school is an excellent example of how to handle the situation. Her husband had taken a professional detour so she could go to medical school, with the understanding that she would do her residency someplace that allowed him to get back on track. He sacrificed when she had no choice, and she made the sacrifice when her options expanded enough to allow it. You just have to recognize whose career can take the hit and rebound from it, and whose can’t.

You’re either a team, or you’re not.

I had a conversation recently with someone who remarked that it wouldn’t be very fair for a program to wait till the last minute to tell me whether I had a job or not. But I think when it comes to things you really want, fairness and timing are irrelevant. If you would let the offer go simply because it came at the last minute, you never wanted it very badly in the first place.

You can make excuses all you want, but the bottom line is that if someone offered you your dream job, and all you had to do was jump on a plane ASAP and go talk to them in person, you’d make whatever arrangements were necessary, and be on the next flight out. It really is that simple.