Spark [Robert_Klitzman]_When_Doctors_Become_Patients(Boo | Seite 245

234 Being a Doctor After Being a Patient
the least physical or psychological risk to them. Suzanne, the psychia-
trist, said:
If I didn’t have bipolar disorder, I would be in ophthalmology now.
I had everything going for me—looks, athleticism, good personal-
ity, nice family, smarts. And then boom, in college, I started having
problems. It slowed me down.
Switching into another field could necessitate additional training. Some
physicians thus tried to scale back work to part-time, but doing so was
difficult. Medicine forced full-time commitment—long hours of follow-
ing up on patient details. Roxanne felt she couldn’t work less because of
professional demands.
There’s always so much to do—charts to dictate, papers and grants
to write. If I don’t do it, it won’t get done. The more I do, I still
don’t catch up. I’m always anxious. Sometimes I just shift the piles
of paper around. But if I get rid of these piles, there will be more.
Patients were often sick enough to require quick and maximal attention.
Given calls and emergencies, it was hard to ‘‘transition out’’ of medicine,
and practice only part-time. Stuart commented, ‘‘You could cut the num-
ber of patients, but not stop the number of phone calls. . . . There wasn’t
enough money to hire another doc.’’ Plans to reduce the amount of work
proved elusive, too, since medicine took on a life of its own. Stuart con-
tinued:
Every time I came back from vacations, I said I would contain the
time. But within a week, the stuff we had planned had failed. I
thought it was just the nature of the practice, of patients’ demands,
and of the illness. But some of it was just obsessive-compulsive.
Again, the profession selected for, and rewarded, such drive.
Working only part-time diminished the amount of disability insurance
one would eventually receive, which had to be weighed against other,
competing desires and goals. These physician-patients thus encountered
quandaries, balancing work gratification, retirement, and health.
Volunteerism
Even after formally retiring from paid employment, many doctors en-
deavored to continue to use their medical skills and knowledge by vo-