Sneaky

When making life decisions, it really does not help things when you do not know what will happen.

Let's take my favorite example -- me.

I've always taken to running thoughts through my head when I come to something like the Amazing Race's Detour tasks, where one has to choose one path over the other. Writing them down is the occasional route being that mostly those that read this blog support "whatever I want to do," which is essentially what I usually decide anyway.

So, here I am. Still relatively young, at age 31, a medical doctor just a few months removed from finishing my Internal Medicine residency and a freshly minted diplomate, adding a few more letters to the end of my name.

So what do I do next or now?

The normal career trajectory would lead me into fellowship. Unfortunately, the fellowship/residency I want to get in to is full as of this writing, so that temporarily closes that door, until I'm gonna force it open a few months from now. Other career options would be to go into other specialties, but shouldn't we want to be in what we're supposed to be training in? A former senior resident/mentor always referred to choosing a subspecialty as picking out a mistress. It better be worth all the risk and it is going to stick with you all through your life. So, I'm waiting.

Case in point, a lot of unknowns here. I don't know if I ever get into that chosen field let, alone be accepted into another one if I don't get into my first choice. I don't know my chances get better if I actually presented myself there as an applicant.

Informed decisions are weighted luxuries we give to our patients. Life decisions just aren't as easy.

While waiting, I'm left without a job. Since I took and passed my exams, I've been mostly in limbo. Waiting in and out of coffee shops (tambay na sosyal), sleeping in at home (tambay na ok-ok ra), helping with research (research assistant, which I lovingly do by the way), driver (drayber), among other things. I've been called once or twice to cover at a mall clinic (mostly malingering patients looking for medical certificates and I swear, I get dumbed down everyday) and covering at a consultant's clinic (better cases and patients with somewhat actual problems). No luck with going on duties at the local hospitals yet, by friends have found it easy to get in (must be me.)

I keep getting questions like "Asa na ka ron?" (Where are you now?) or "Asa na ka nag-raket?" (Where are you racketing? -- I keep asking myself why oh why do we refer to earning our living with different doctor jobs as "raket"? I choose to use Gaya's reference to that with "gigs." "Raket" just sounds...illegal). Those questions are customarily answered with the truth -- jobless.

Moonlighting has taken several meanings for us in the medical field, but it still remains largely more profitable than those in regular residency jobs. By the time I finished residency, my friends had cars, DSLR cameras, and gadgets up the wazoo. So where to go to earn money? The local primary care clinics need doctors and pay by the hour, but hardly commensurate to the effort and the headaches of having to face mostly malingering patients. The hospitals in the city without residency training programs look for junior consultants but it's been mostly arranged internally between doctors. I've asked friends if there are hospitals in the provinces that they could get me into temporarily, and someone said I was too "fragile" for the rural scene (Really? Fragile?). My wife and I (when we were still unattached) had often thought of joining Doctors Without Borders, roughing it in Lebanon, Afghanistan, or some other war-torn, famine-stricken country but I guess, those are just the thoughts of someone not fit for the Philippine rural scene.

Then, there are those avenues not in the medical field. There are always those options up the creative streets, the arts, and even business.

All those things still do not have one certain thing about them. I don't know what happens or how everything turns out.

Life has a funny way of sneaking up on you and either giving you a jolly good scare, or a pleasant surprise. Either way, I guess I'm taking it one step at a time, enjoying friends and family. Laughing, loving, and living -- and because in a few months time, whatever it is I get into for the time-being, I'll have to leave for more training, more painstaking histories and physical exams, more work, less pay, more challenges, less time-off and simply, more things to do.

Or maybe the world really does end in December 2012...

Life's really sneaky, ain't it?