Why Family Medicine is such a great Profession.....

In the last few days, I excised skin cancers, reconstructed some ugly facial wounds, solved a little girl's ongoing abdominal pain (turned out to be Celiac Disease), helped a depressed and suicidal teenager, ablated a supraventricular tachycardia, diagnosed a flesh eating disease "in time", made it possible for an end-stage Cardiac Failure Patient to travel with her Family to a Mexican resort and resolved a person's headache that had lasted for months (responded to Doxycycline which inhibits tumour necrosis factor alpha...a new discovery by a Neurologist in Edmonton).

And these are just the cases that I remember from an intense, dizzying pace wrought with emergencies, intense pressure, and unpredictable hours.

My wife and my staff manage the 250+ calls to our clinic daily while conducting a virtual cacophony of verbalized suffering into a virtuoso's daily masterpiece of combatting disease and anguish.  

Thank God for my wife!  Without her, I don't think that I could practice Medicine...she makes it so I can just get on with the business of being a Doctor...without having to attend to the business of being a Doctor....does that make sense?  This woman is PERFECT, and soon I will have been married to her for 16 of the 22 years we've been together!

And the reward for all of this work and exhaustion?  It certainly isn't the huge paycheques, paid vacations or large dividend payouts....

This week's payoff was a hug and "thank-you" from a little girl with celiac disease, proving that she wasn't faking all the abdominal pain to get out of school all these months; FORMERLY earning her parents' ongoing suspicious ire.

While it is fun to bitch about the ongoing and seemingly innumerable injustices that Family Doctors face in daily practice; it is a huge secret of the Profession that this is the ONE Profession that - if done well - will keep you in the highest regard of people, provide the highest personal satisfaction of any occupation and reaffirm the indescribable feeling that for a great many people - you are making their lives a great deal better than almost anyone else can or ever will possibly do for them.....

Sure, my office costs are getting out of control and my paycheque keeps shrinking...but at the end of the day, I and my family still live well, people are working on the "paycheque thing" and I'm really very happy.  What more could a person want?  

It has been said that a single failure in the home is not worth any amount of success in life...wisdom to live by!

It's late on Friday night and I've finished my mound of paperwork that will grow my another 20lb by Monday evening....I suppose that I can get back to more bitching then.....