I'm having a bit of a "come to Jesus" moment. Technically, I suppose it's more of a month than a moment. Nevertheless, I'm being pushed to think about my life from a slightly different angle right now. It's scary. It's humbling. Most importantly, it's making me realize that I've got to find a way to make things slow down.
I've been sitting around mumbling for a couple of months that my life has become too busy and too out of control. Easter weekend proved that point when I was so exhausted that I couldn't manage to pack to make a flight to Austin. Me. I missed a weekend in Austin. Need I say more? I stayed home, hid out, and slept most of the weekend. And while the resting was good, it also made me realize that I'm running way too hard all of the time.
April was what it was- lots of travel, mostly work related, and my annual little bike ride from Houston to Austin. I was away from home more than I liked. By the time I hit Chicago for the annual Burn meeting, I was tired and crabby from travel. The fact that I got an infection in my foot while I was there contributed to a relatively miserable meeting. When I got off the plane from Chicago, I immediately leapt back into work in the form of 3 weeks in the burn unit with scarcely a moment to even unpack. Last week I found out that I have a fractured foot that I've been running around on for heaven-knows-how-long, though it manages to explain why my foot has been painful and swollen even once the redness went away. Then today......well, sparing the details I'll just say that I had a stressful health morning. After some labs and several hours of heartache, the working diagnosis is that I have post-infectious glomerulonephritis. For the non-medical, it means that I've had an autoimmune complication from the infection that's making my kidneys work not-quite-right.
See, humbling. I'm not superhuman after all, my outstanding efforts to the contrary. Between all of this stuff and me having to honestly tell someone that I think all I've done for the last 6 months is work (except for the ride), I've realized that things have to change. It's not just that I don't want to keep working this hard- it's that I can't. It's not worth it. If anything, I'm being made to realize that I need space back for me. Somewhere, somehow that got lost in all of this. And I miss my time to play; I don't love being a grown-up enough to do it full-time.
So now I get to figure out how to "quit" the trauma service without pissing off my colleagues. That's the only thing in my work life that can conceivably be done away with (unless I stop doing research, which is NOT an option), and while I'm being told that it can happen fairly soon I think it's time for me to push the issue. I don't think I have a year of living like this left in me.
----------------
Now playing: Live - Run Away
via FoxyTunes