Just like the church calls the living the militants, which is a symbol that we are in constant motion, in pursuit of something good while facing the whole ups and downs, so also, are we going through different situations in our various ends worrying about lots of things left unsolved.
Personally, there's a a lot of things on my mind, it's not even one to be honest but for the purpose of this post, I'll be talking about that singular one that's affecting my mental health because it's what I get in contact with on a daily basis.
Doctors Aren't Appreciated In My Country, Nigeria
Sorry if it feels like I've been away for a very long time only to come back and next thing I'm doing is to complain, hehe. But well, they say that, *"out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh I guess".
Doctors often preach about how wonderful it is to take care of our heath, eat well and sleep well for your body to be healthy but guess what? The schedule doctors run in this country feels like a mirage in the sense that you can't even do what you preach.
For the days you're on call( night duty), you get to work as early as 7 a.m, starts working till it's 4 a.m, doing wardrounds, attending to outpatients and resecuring Intravenous accesses that have dislodged for one reason or another so that the patients can receive their medications and before you know it, it's almost 2 a.m and you battle to take permission to go and take your breakfast, bruh! I mean breakfast by 2 p.m and sometimes you won't even go because you'll be so so busy.
Now you start your call by 4 p.m the same day, works round the clock and even if you don't admit a new patient throughout the night, the patients you already admitted will be under your monitoring and next on the clock will be 3 a.m and you're yet to sleep, most times you don't get to sleep at all especially if you have a blood transfusion to give and you're in Paediatrics department where I am now that you don't just hang the blood but rather push it gently using 2cc needle and syringe.
You finally end your call by 6:30 a.m and you've got just 30mins to go and prepare come back the next day and run the same schedule however ending by 4 p.m if you've got no night shift or call like we popularly say.
Now the worst of them is that the pay is not commensurate with the stress you pass through!!!
Why won't it be affecting doctor's mental health? When you work like an elephant but end up eating like an ant?
How do I intend to tackle it?
Hehehe, I guess you already know the answer even before answering. Just like 90% of the doctors in the country, I have same ideology, "the Japa escape" because that's the only way to get what you deserve in this profession because Nigeria has no plans for her medical doctors.
But, until then, we keep working picking up the skills we need and looking ahead for the day we finally set our plans in motion
Stay healthy regardless.
Thanks for reading and have a nice day ahead
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