Posted by mtdewcmu on May 4, 2011, at 23:49:42
In reply to Re: School and psychiatric illness » Phillipa, posted by SLS on May 4, 2011, at 20:54:40
> Phillipa.
>
> I don't understand your post. I find it difficult to parse. Is it your contention that your long history of MI issues has nothing to do with the early stresses of going to nursing school and working as an RN? It seems to me that you are the ideal example of how chronic stress can precipitate a MI. I'm glad you are happy with your choices. One could make the argument that you have traded your mental health for a career choice. This is precisely what my doctors at the NIH had warned me about.
>Scott,
Your understanding of Phillipa's career seems to be that it would have some kind of cumulative effect and worsen her MI over time. I worked in nursing. I never achieved the level of nurse, as I took a job as a nurse aide with the plan of going to nursing school and then moving up, and after finishing school I changed my plans. But I experienced the flow of it and got to know the nurses. If you are a bedside nurse, each shift is self-contained. You don't take any responsibility or stress from one shift to the next. So there is no buildup of stress from the work. It gets exciting when your patients have emergencies or a lot of orders, and then there is stress in the moment, but you either deal with it or not in that shift and then your responsibility ends. So I did not find it to be the kind of job where the stress would eat away at you and precipitate MI. The only source of that is your relationships and politics with the staff (which was my downfall).
I think most of the time a career as a doctor involves the kind of stress that lingers and eats away at you to one degree or the other. It's probably better in emergency medicine. But most of the time doctors have the same patient for a span of time, and they are more responsible for the outcome. That, and I'm sure there is paperwork and other responsibilities. So, being a doctor is probably a different ballgame. But the feeling you have after working a heavy rotation in nursing is somewhere between finishing up a triathlon and coming back from combat, where your side didn't take any casualties. It's generally a positive feeling.
Real psych patient. Not a real doctor. Contact a doctor for medical advice.
40mg citalopram, 20mg ish d-amphetamine, 15mg mirtazapine
poster:mtdewcmu
thread:984211
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20110502/msgs/984587.html