My thoughts too. My niece is an Emergency Room doctor at the VA in downtown Detroit and the vast majority of the patients she sees are family member, not actual vets. And they're all demanding.....
Her hours are crazy, one week she may have to work days, others afternoons, some days 12 hours.
Her brother is a thoracic surgeon at a local hospital. Typical days starts at 7:00 a.m. and most days he doesn't get home till 10:00 at night. Always on call, some weekends he has to work while the rest of the world has off. Holidays are the same, he may get get time off or scheduled to work.......
Most people have no idea of the actual bullshit members of the medical community have to put up with but yet they piss and moan over their co-pays and deductibles while never giving a thought about the $500 maintenance charge of their vehicle at the dealership.
I suspect you understand this well. I have routinely worked 60 hour weeks for decades plus call, plus weekends.
All those vacations and events I had to plan around my call schedule, I was a slave to it.
As I have gotten on in years, they have taken me off call and given it to the young bucks who want the money.
I don’t want the money. I want peace and sleep. For years, the sound of the pager going off would spike my blood pressure, and if I was sleeping, I would levitate off the bed and my heart would pound like a jackhammer.
My wife and I were watching television a couple of decades ago, and a commercial came on that had a pager going off. I jerked involuntarily and my eyes bugged out while sitting next to her, and she gently suggested I should find another line of work. I left clinical and went into IT, but still had to carry the pager around for another 20 years.
I was famous in my group of friends for having thrown my pager over a house at a party.
Now, I carry it as a page of last resort...if someone has a problem they can’t fix, they can page me. And they do pretty well not paging me, which is good, because I have become quite grouchy if I am awakened in the wee hours of the morning and have to battle myself to stay civil and cogent at 0300.
Sigh. I have given my pound of flesh in the service of my profession. I don’t regret it at all, but the hours and the call have taken a toll on me, for sure.
There are a lot of people like me in healthcare, I think.
I was a military brat of a 30 year Navy man, so I saw my mom and dad doing their healthcare. I don’t begrudge my mom her care, because boy, she put up with a huge amount being a Navy wife.
God Bless that woman.