I am not a morning person.
I don’t like early starts, and I don’t drink coffee, so it takes me a while to properly wake up. This means that it is best to avoid speaking to me until after 9 to 10am, because I am very cranky in the mornings. Because I am not a morning person.
However, there is a colleague of mine at work who doesn’t quite understand this, and not going to lie, it has been really annoying. You know when someone keeps talking to you and you’re not really in the mood but they take your silence/monosyllabic responses as encouragement and keep going? Yeah, this has been my life.
Something I’ve started doing recently is praying specifically before each shift for God to point me in the direction of patients I can help the most. I used to get frustrated working on the wards because I felt like I didn’t have enough time for everyone, as it’s just not possible to do jobs and spend one-on-one time with every patient, so feeling like I’ve made a difference for at least one person is a good start.
How is this relevant to my annoying colleague, you ask? Well about a week ago, after my pre-shift prayer for pointing in the direction of the patient who I could help the most that day, I felt very strongly that it was my chatty colleague that I had to make time for, and that could have only been God to be honest, because I most certainly would not have done what I did next on my own volition… I asked follow-up questions and had a proper conversation with them that morning.
And boy did they have a lot to say! My colleague told me about how they lived alone and had been going through some difficulties in their personal life so didn’t see many people outside work, so they liked talking to people at work because it was their main source of social interaction, and they were glad I was asking them how they were, because not many people did anymore.
That really moved me – I felt so so guilty for not making more of an effort with them earlier, so there was definitely a lesson from God for me about being kind and making time for others. I thought that was the end of it, but God was really drumming that point home that day!
Later in the afternoon, I was overwhelmed with jobs and stressing about having to put in my first nasogastric tube in over a year for a patient – can you guess which of my colleagues took my jobs list from me and volunteered to do the NG tube for me without me asking? Yupp, my “annoying” colleague. They were grateful for our chat in the morning and wanted to help me out with jobs, and ended up inadvertently choosing the one I’d been putting off most.
I cried, ofcourse.
So yeah, patience is very much a virtue that I am working on, and part of it is not being so snappy and irritable with people. Even if I’m still not a morning person.
In other news, the life of Tai has been pretty busy recently. From planning and running teaching sessions, to putting together abstracts/posters for conferences and getting on with my PGCert assignment (writing my first essay in nearly five years, no biggie…), it’s been hectic times. But I’m getting by and taking things one day at a time, and still grateful for this year out. MSRA results are finally out and I’ll be confirming where I’m going for GP training soon, but that’s a post for another day…
Life As A Junior Doctor 