Monday: Trying to Doctor Again

Morning:

It's a hard Monday morning. I don't like to have hard Monday mornings. I know that many people don't want to return to work on Monday. But I'm not supposed to feel that way. I do believe that I have a great job. Perhaps it's one of the greatest jobs there are. These days, there is enormous dissatisfaction among physicians. It's unfortunate. This is coming from severe downward economic pressures combined with decreasing automatic respect for physicians. It affects me, like it does "everyone" else. Sometimes it affects me more, and sometimes less. Still, most of the time I want to be in love with my job. I want to be as excited about it as I was when I started - in Medical School, and the beginning of Internship (before the severe sleep deprivation kicks in and creates numbness). But I don't think the trouble in coming back and being a doctor this morning is from the "illness of medicine". It's more just the ordinary "Monday morning blues". It was just a great weekend. After great weekends, work can seem ordinary -- even this type of "work". It's wrong to see doctoring as "work". There's a "higher" way to see it. Still, in this culture, in this day, it's hard not to see it as work. You can't really go in to a patient's room and think you're going to work and be a great doctor. It doesn't really work quite right, because you're not completely there, "doctoring". You're there "working". Those aren't at all the same. So even though I'm "at work", I can't "work here". It isn't an easy thing to do. I can put on my white coat. That's easy to do. But there's also a "white brain" that you need to put on. It's just that there's no way to take out the regular, every day gray brain and put in the white brain the way that you put on the white coat and the stethescope. I wrote a prayer for before I walk into a patient's room one time. I used to say it before I walked into there for about six months or so, but then I stopped. I think it might have helped with this issue. I used to think that coffee helped with this, but it really doesn't. I need to develop better "white brain" insurance: a procedure that guarantees I can have that frame of mind whenever I see a patient. I think I get it right most of the time. I hope I do, anyway. No one really checks for that. Medicare has a plan to measure "quality of care". I wonder if they're going to measure "white brain".