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This was a new experience for me.
My stress is typically more of the low-level-anxiety, butterflies-in-the-stomach, tight-in-the-shoulders kind. So this feeling of an elephant sitting on my chest and the sudden ability to clearly feel my heart pounding in my neck and even behind my eyeballs surprised me.
My emotional game on an off-day usually consists of a fair amount of “f this s”, “poor me”, and a good dose of aimless anger. (Luckily, I’ve learnt to recognise that anger for what it is: a manifestation of stress and a displacement of frustration at my own inadequacies, so I don’t often express it externally. Except at the computers. I’ll happily bitch loudly about that.) But on this night, I experienced an immense desire to get up, walk out (possibly in tears) and never come back.
The thing is – it wasn’t even a particularly rough shift. I had a case that worried me, and a few things were happening at once, which is never my strong suit, but I’ve survived shifts ten times as busy, filled with plenty more crazy, hundreds of times over the course of my career. Mostly with a reasonable level of equanimity.
In the post-game analysis the next day, with a clearer mind, I came up with the following explanations:
I ignored my own advice from a previous post on how to optimise for a shift. It was a busy time for me, so in the morning before my shift, I skipped meditation, did just a token half-arsed workout and missed out on my 15-minute nap. I probably also didn’t have quite enough sleep the previous night.
There was a lot going on outside of work during that time. The irony is that it was mostly good stuff: I was prepping for exciting conferences and talks for the Vet Vault, doing the paperwork for a new sponsor, finalising the process of remortgaging our house, which will save us lots of $$, and launching the new advanced surgery podcast.
But I’m reminded of something I learnt a while back: the brain has a finite ability to deal with new things. More than two new things at a time, even if they’re positive things, will manifest as stress.
I believed that old lie that I’m bulletproof and that I can do it all. The shift starts at 3pm, which leaves the morning open for other stuff. That morning, I filled the entire day with Vet Vault work, so by the end of that day I had worked 17 or 18 hours. Again, it was mostly work that I love, but that meant I had been ‘on’ for 17 hours, with no time to deflate.
Because of all the stuff I had going on that day, I was hoping for a low-pressure shift – which is ALWAYS a mistake. I’m not one for superstitions, however thinking, “I really hope it’s a chilled shift” is just asking for trouble! But superstition aside, unmet expectations often lead to disappointment and a vague sense of being wronged by the universe.
The case that worried me on the shift was almost a carbon copy of a case I had just a week earlier, and the previous one had not ended well. I believe that having that similar case triggered excessively strong emotions because the first case was actually a little mini-trauma that I had not dealt with. (Go listen to our old episode with Rhonda Andrews on cumulative trauma.) After 22 years in practice, it’s easy to believe that things no longer affect you. That’s a mistake.
It’s important to note that my little moment wasn’t caused by one thing in isolation. It wasn’t that case, it wasn’t the fact that I skipped meditation or was a bit under-slept. As resilient people we can actually cope with a lot.
What we do need to be aware of is the cumulative effects of the Many Small Things that sneak up and then blindside you with a raging tachycardia on an otherwise unremarkable Thursday night.
The solutions to most of these issues are pretty obvious, right? Like most of what ails us, we know the answers, but yet we don’t do them. The problem is that sometimes life just happens like that: all the things happen at once, and you need to skip that nap and stay up a bit late. (Or we think we do.)
In the next post, I’ll discuss what I’ll be better at going forward. And I’ll also discuss what saved me from curling up under the desk in the foetal position with a dog blanket over my head or actually walking out the door.
This first appeared in The Vet Vault 3.2.1 email on 9.8.24
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