(Keep an eye out for my upcoming book, The Doctors Guide to Finding Joy in Your Work, which will come out on March 11th through Amazon. We can all use a little more joy in our lives and this book will help you attain it.)
“I hate the Monday after a call weekend.” Have you ever said this, or something like it? Maybe you hate the first day back after a vacation. Or maybe it is a certain day of the week when you wake up and know it will be a rotten day, because Thursdays are always bad days.
I’ve had this conversation with myself on several occasions. Most of the time I would resign myself to that fact and grin and bear it as one of the thorns of my job, as if there was nothing I could do about it.
Then one day I decided to try to make my bad day better. The results changed my practice and my life from that day forward. The following story is an excerpt from my upcoming book that demonstrates that we do have the power to change many of the things we hate about our jobs. Why go on hating something, if it can be changed into a pleasant experience.
From The Doctors Guide to Finding Joy in Your Work
In my general surgery practice, my call weekend lasted from Friday morning to Monday morning—a 72-hour shift. On Monday morning when my call ended, I often had 10 new patients in the hospital, two of whom needed to have a surgical procedure squeezed into my already-full day. My Mondays consisted of both a morning and an afternoon clinic previously scheduled, full of patients.
In order to add these two urgent operations to my already-full Monday schedule, I often had to cancel several of my clinic patients. I didn’t like canceling patient visits, my patients who got canceled didn’t like it, and the office staff who had to call them didn’t like it. Mondays after call were miserable days.
For years I woke up Monday mornings after call telling myself, “I hate the Monday after weekend call.” Yet I did nothing about it. I had resigned myself to accepting that Mondays after a call weekend would be the miserable fate of a surgeon and took my lumps while continuing to gripe about it.
One day, I woke up and once again said, “I hate the Monday after weekend call.” Then I paused on the side of my bed and for the first time wondered if there was a way to make it better. I started listing ways these Miserable Mondays could be improved. Here are the options I wrote down:
1. Stop taking call for the hospital emergency department.
2. Trade my 72-hour call weekends for three 24-hour call weekdays.
3. Trade my 72-hour call weekends for four 24-hour call weekdays.
4. Pay someone else to take my weekend call.
5. Swap my Monday clinic day with my Tuesday day off after call weekends.
6. Change my schedule to permanently move my day off from Tuesday to Monday.
7. Don’t schedule clinic patients on the Monday after a call weekend.
8. Hire a PA to do the Monday clinic.
9. Get a new job that doesn’t require taking call.
10. Retire.
Before I left the house that Monday morning, I had 10 ways to make the Mondays after call better.
Some of these ideas didn’t seem very feasible, such as retiring, since I was only a few years into my medical career and could not afford to retire yet. Others had promise.
After weighing the pros and cons and the feasibility of each option, I decided to try option 7. I would no longer schedule any patients in my Monday clinic whenever I was on call for the weekend. This occurred on only 10 Mondays per year.
Upon entering the office that day, I went straight to the office manager and told her I wanted to make a change in my schedule. I explained why the Mondays after call weekends were miserable for me, the staff, and the clinic patients. She agreed. Since the weekend call schedule was posted a year in advance, we knew exactly which weekends I would be on call well ahead of time. I asked her to look at the call schedule and every time I was on call for the weekend, book me out of the office the following Monday. She said she would take care of it.
This one change meant I wouldn’t have any more Miserable Mondays for the rest of my life!
The next weekend I was on call, I did not set my alarm on Sunday night. Although I had a lot of new patients in the hospital, I didn’t have a time crunch to get rounds completed, since I would not be going to the office that day. I awoke that morning when my body told me I had slept enough.
After breakfast with my wife, I drove to the hospital to make rounds. My first stop was the operating room to talk with the nurse in charge to see where we could work in my two patients who needed surgery. We scheduled the surgeries, and I made rounds at a comfortable pace.
After rounds, I went home and worked around the house while waiting for my turn in the operating room. The pre-op staff called me back into the hospital when it was time for the first surgery to begin. I had a very enjoyable day.
I couldn’t believe it took me so long to figure out that I had the power to fix my Miserable Mondays. This issue was a self-inflicted wound. The solution was so easy, yet it took years for me to recognize it and act on the problem.
How many things do you have in your life that you say you hate? Have you ever tried to eliminate them or make them better? Or do you do what I did for years and just continue to do things that I hate?
You and I have the power to make our lives/jobs better. Just because you have a boss who “always did it that way” doesn’t mean you can’t make a new way of doing things that will be better for everyone. We must learn to act on these statements.
Anytime you say you hate something, write it down! You have just found something that is taking away joy in your life. Now is your chance to either do less of it or make a change that lessens or eliminates your hate of that thing. Never again should you let this thought go by without addressing the issue. Life will be a lot happier if we all do less of what we hate and more of what we love. Try it.
This concept of finding ways to bring more joy into our lives is what my new book is all about. If you want more joy in your life, get a copy from Amazon as soon as the release date is announced so you can start increasing your level of joy. Then if the book helps you, please leave a five star review on Amazon to help others find their joy.
We can all use a little more joy in our lives.
Dr. Fawcett,
It was good you made solutions to your schedule to improve your life during your weekends on call. This, I believe, was a simple solution.
I was in a group of 4 neurosurgeons east of Los Angeles. We covered 6 hospitals. Being on call was always filled with difficult decisions for our group. If we were on call a couple of days a week, then getting to know the new patients was difficult and taking any vacation time was always an imposition on someone else’s time off. Our solution was to be on call for a week at a time which meant vacations could be arranged without a conflict and this alleviated having to learn about new patients every few days or so. However, it made the week on call a week from hell. You can imaging the number of calls we would get each week, the number of cases to be seen in the middle of the night with regularity, having to operate at all hours of the day and night. This worked well when we were all young. I retired 7 years ago when I was 65 and I don’t think I could have taken another day on call.
To not take call and only do elective cases did not help my partners and it would have been too expensive to bring on another associate while the retired surgeon was doing all elective cases which took away the patient volume from a new associates case load. So, that solution was not viable for the group.
I am happy that I retired, but being retired takes a lot of money. I have been doing some defense work for personal injury cases which is work I can do from home, is not time intensive and much more relaxing. It is very interesting how corrupt so many physicians have become who treat patients for the plaintiffs.
Great article about making a positive change in your practice. Lia did make a valid comment, that many of us in a corporate medical practice have limited control over our schedules. I have especially hated the Monday after daylight savings starts, as we just did. As I got older (over 65 now) the loss of one hour became a bigger drag over time. I started taking that Monday off, once a year as a vacation day and it made a huge difference for that one day.
When l started my practice, my partner had Fridays off and l had Mondays off. After some time l realized my Tuesdays were horribly busy, so l saw patients Monday mornings which made my Tuesdays very acceptable. Stepping back and analyzing my problem was a very simple fix.
I found this article to be inspiring and yet… in practices owned by hospitals, the ability to flex your schedule has eroded. The opportunity to do what is best for patients, and in my case children, flies in the face of how to make more money. Many pediatricians are facing complete loss of autonomy that is soul sucking.
I host the Pediatric Meltdown podcast on children’s mental health and physician wellness and wonder if Dr. Fawcett would be interested in being a guest. Here is the website http://www.pediatricmeltdown.com. Over 235 episodes with leading child experts!
Lia, you ability to alter your schedule has not eroded, it has changed though. There is always a better way. I’d be happy to be on your podcast. I’ll get in touch
Isn’t the issue now that you lost your day off?
So now instead of having a miserable Monday and being off on Tuesday, you have a better but likely inefficient Monday but now also have to work on Tuesday.
I’m not sure if that trade would have been worth it to me. Time off is too precious.
Ryan, No I didn’t trade my Tuesday off. I kept Tuesday off and added Monday off every time I was on call for the weekend.