Yes, this is a photo of a doctor. Perhaps not yours…yet.
When I worked in a locked psychiatric unit, or more precisely, in several psychiatric units, the one person who could never be replaced was the doctor.
At times, the doctors I spoke to were residents. These individuals are typically highly intelligent individuals, who were attempting to become specialists in psychiatry. My home unit held 17-older adults with medical problems.
In fact, I actually had a civilian ask me once if schizophrenics got life-threatening diseases like cancer. It was all I could do not to laugh in her face. Schizophrenics, are human beings. Not dogs.
They get every mean disease known to man—or women. Once, we had a young woman who had been diagnosed with Bipolar Depression. She also had advanced breast cancer.
I went into her room, and even to this day, I cannot forget what I saw. Where most women have two breasts, she had but two globs of gelatinous matter. No skin covered these balls of jelly. I will never be able to unsee what I saw. What was worse is that she had something called triple-negative breast cancer.
It is cancer that does not have receptors for either estrogen, progesterone or growth hormone—hence it is triple negative. It is more prevalent amongst blacks and latinos, but white women should not be feeling safe. Remember Joan Lunden? She was a premier newswoman in the ‘80s. White as the driven snow, she got triple negative breast cancer, but survived to write several books, including Had I Known, about her struggle with breast cancer.
What would happen to you, if you got that horrible life-changing diagnosis, and there was no doctor to care for you?
This could happen. When I left my last nursing job, I was making as a per-diem nurse, between $45-$65 an hour. One night on Levy 9, I needed a restraint order to be signed so I called the resident. After she arrived, and we had put out that particular fire, she confessed to me that she only made $10/ hour.
Having no idea why she brought that up, I began to feel a bit anxious because my work had not been finished, and it started to get near what I used to call”The Witching Hour,” when the next shift landed on the unit and needed my report.
Think of $10/ hour vs $45 and up. Once I actually took home $600 because they needed a nurse to fill a hard-to-fill shift. It took me less than 4-years to get a BSN, plus another layer called BC, (Board Certified.) This was bestowed after a fixed number of hours worked plus an exam. I know how to take tests, an important skill.
My resident that night had to be wealthy or come from a wealthy family for her to exist in Philadelphia 10-years-ago. It is most likely the same today. Of course, the paycheck of a resident may be variable considering the specialty. Psychiatry was always treated like an ugly stepchild.
Although the rate of med school acceptance has not changed, younger doctors are leaving the profession for greener pastures. According to KevinMD.com and MedpageToday.com, young doctors, suffering under large patient loads and stress, are ditching direct patient care for more lucrative activities.
For example, pharmaceutical companies and other more lucrative opportunities are luring them away, only to be replaced by new doctors who in turn may leave for other opportunities. A vicious cycle that has been caused in part by insurance companies and edicts like Obamacare from the Federal government.
So, a coterie of medical brilliance is shed every year due to stressful working conditions. We had our share of stress working in psychiatry, but I always believed that psychiatry was the bedrock of physical health.
So much health rests in the mind of the patient. With the current punishing inflation, hospitals and those they serve are under undue pressure. College and graduate college programs are pricing inflation into their tuitions.
We may be wading into uncharted territory, and the young people in college today must funnel exploding tuitions into future career decisions. Student debt is no laughing matter,
I once used a urologist here in Puerto Rico who confessed he was, at 50-something-years old, still paying off his undergraduate years at MIT. “I did have a great experience there,” he said.
Would his 50-ish self rethink his decision right now and become a plumber instead? I did not ask him but I am betting that parents nowadays are worried when they go on college visits. Those saved college dollars won’t be enough, will they?
The full impact of our current inflation has not yet been calculated. But it does not take a genius to know that it becomes difficult to find that perfect doctor for your needs as you grow older. Trust me, as a crusty old broad, where we live they hardly know how to pick up a phone. They are swamped.
One reason is that medicine is not the gravy train that it was five decades ago. I once had a wonderful diagnostician tell me that he was completely dissatisfied with his career and in particular— the money he made from it. That was in Philadelphia, not Puerto Rico.
Another shortage that gets scant respect from media is the shortage of airline pilots. This storm has been brewing for just a few decades. Pilots are generally not flying when they get to their mid 50s. It is a question of public safety. One hopes that their pilot can see where he is flying and be of sound health and mind.
I spoke to a pair of them a few years ago while I was out with a girlfriend. Their opinion was that humans could only manage the harsh reality of working with little or no sleep for only so long. Then he told me that usually they just put it into auto-pilot and go to sleep. One would hope that they are light sleepers.
I have never been able to sleep on a plane. Perhaps there is a reason? Am I psychic or have there been a few near-misses of late?
The verdict is that yes, I tend to be a tat psychic and also yes, there have been near misses of late, notably with JetBlue. Most likely other airlines as well are feeling the heat of increased air traffic. Covid is over, at least for now, so pent up demand for travel is one aspect of the reported near misses.
Being American also means that we have built-on wanderlust in our genes. That is how the West was won and how we managed to win two world wars and in between make a canal in Panama and send a couple of humans to the moon.
We just love to roam. Independently pushing forward is written in both our history and our gene pool. We can’t fool either.