Time enough at last

I left general practice – a job I felt was ultimately, and quite literally, killing me – after nearly two decades, and began a career in clinical pathology four years ago.

Some residency (training) programmes are three years, but ours is a commercial lab so it takes a little longer. I have been building toward the final exam all that time, to become a “boarded” (qualified) clinical pathologist – a job, which aside from not being potentially lethal, I actively enjoy and consider myself extremely lucky to have found.

Yesterday, the August 2020 exam I have been working towards, which was widely expected to be delayed until November, was instead cancelled. The next one will be in August 2021.

Juggling roles

Lockdown has been tough – not least because I’m very aware that it’s been even tougher for many other people. I still have a job, and an industry, and I live in a country that has something approaching a welfare state; I’m privileged and protected from many of the fears that have plagued much of the world… but that doesn’t mean that my world hasn’t been turned upside down.

The past three months have been a juggling act of three jobs: working from home, looking after my three-year old and five-year old, and studying for an exam I’ve been building up to for four years.

These three jobs are not natural bedfellows, and it’s been hard to delineate them when they’ve all essentially been occurring in the same room. My workload had dropped off hugely, I’ve lost my patience with my children more times than I would like to admit, and my motivation for study dropped off a cliff, but I persevered. I felt I was failing at all three jobs, but I stuck with all of them.

Boy, interrupted

August seemed unlikely for the exam, but thinking like that didn’t help my motivation very much, so I wrote my notes and read the journals and tried not to worry, thinking that at least we had November as a back-up.

Yesterday hit me harder than I wanted to admit. I can’t count the number of people who have said “Hooray! You have time now! Time for everything you’ve wanted to do, you can forget about studying!” – as if I can instantly switch off the years and months of pressure I’ve been building up on myself and forget about it.

Instead, I come into this room and can barely stand to look at the half-finished notes and the pile of textbooks and journals that have been a third of my life during the isolation. Every time I have a free moment, I feel the familiar guilt that I probably should be reading something, followed a second later by the realisation that it doesn’t matter any more.

I can’t bear to even look at a book at the moment.

Loss of knowledge

This break from study should make me feel peaceful, but, instead, it fills me with anxiety that all that knowledge is slipping away again – and, right now, I can’t stand to think about starting from scratch. I even picked up my notes this morning and started flipping through them, but the knowledge is stubborn and slippery and, honestly, I can’t bring myself to care; not for today, at least.

It seems strange to say I’m grieving for loss when I’m talking about an exam; stranger still when half the planet is shocked and grieving too, and my own small loss is nothing to the losses of so many others. Nevertheless, today, and tomorrow, and for a few days yet, I’m struggling.

Personal struggle

I haven’t been part of the very real and serious stresses that have hit general practitioners in the past few months, and I’m ashamed to say I’m very grateful to have missed them, because it’s been awful. However, even my own little corner of the profession is not immune from the reaches of COVID-19, and this is a small window on the small troubles of a trainee pathologist.

Writing is therapy for me, and this has been helpful. Things will get better and things will be all right – this I know. But, just for today, I’m struggling.