WE DOCTORS ARE HUMAN TOO

In the name of Allah, The Most Gracious, Most Merciful

I have been working as a health care provider for almost a year now. So how was it? Like many other things in life, I believe there will always be up and down in everything. Whatever we do, where ever we go, we will experience this phase, the only difference is the working environment and social support.

Before I started working as a house-officer, I heard lots of people say, working as a doctor, you will have no life. Most of the time you will be at the hospital with patients. I even heard people told me this one "fact" saying that doctors have a high divorce rate in Malaysia (this need to be confirmed) because they worked so hard till they have no or little time with their family.

I'm a bit skeptical about all those "facts", because I've seen doctors, specialist and even consultants who can still have a good family time even though they worked more than 70 hours per week. I keep asking myself, how in this world do they manage balancing their personal life and work as a doctor? How come there are doctors who can live happily with their family while there there are other group of doctors who had to end their marriage?

After sometimes I realized, it is not about the duration of time they spend with their family, but the reason this group of doctor manage to keep their family together because they have a good family support. A family that understand and respect their profession as a health care provider.

I believe every family would like to have at least one person in their family to be a doctor. The thing is, how many of them can really respect or at least understand the profession ? Not all of us have fix working hours, not all of us have off days during weekend like those who work in the office. Only once awhile we can have those off days during weekend, that is if we are lucky enough, otherwise we can only dream about sleeping after having our lunch during weekends.

Most people don't understand, we are not complaining when we talked about those working hours, we love our jobs even though we often got scolded by our senior officers and even patients in the hospital. We just want you guys to understand our profession. Just because we can't have a normal life like those who work  from 8am-5pm 5days a week, doesn't mean we don't care about our family. Please show a bit of humanity to us. We work more hours than other people and we sleep less hours than others, trust me if you ask any house officers what is their plan during off days. Most of them will answer "an 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep will be great"

We do really want to have some good time with our family, but for us we need to plan for it very carefully, in a very peaceful environment. To put it simple, please don't tell us what to do, please don't tell us we must go here and there during our off days. We are adults, you can give us suggestions but let us decide ourselves. Sometimes I think it can be very stressful if other people tell you to do this and that without even asking your opinion about it. Common sense is not very common anymore.

Luckily my wife and family are very supportive and very understanding about my carrier. For those parents, wife, in-laws of a doctor, I can only say, your son/daughter/husband/wife/in-law is not a trophy for you to brag about during family gathering. They are human being who had feeling and physical limitations, so start treating them like one.

A.Khairul