My favourite Sunday of all Sundays

Hello again. I am back.

Right on time, I am writing again on a Sunday night. But for the first time, I am not writing to delay the inevitability of Mondays, but to welcome it's arrival, as it marks the end of what has been a very long week.

That's not to say that this was a bad week. Quite the opposite in fact. It was long in the sense that I feel like I have come out from the other side, quite different. To delve into the details of this may be too much of a demand to put on my sleep-deprived mind. But I think I must attempt. I owe it to myself, I've worked far too hard this week, to not keep a reminder.

Being on call is my one biggest fear. There is no comparison to the thrill of being called at 2am and your patient has a hemoglobin of 51 after 3 units of pack red blood cells and somehow the lab is closed and you cannot order any more units. Thankfully, this was a happy ending, the patient was not actively bleeding. But my nights were littered with calls like this, in which I would wake up at 3AM and have to make a decision about what medication to start, when to be worried. For someone who worries very easily and also indecisive to a fault, this was my worst nightmare. Also I'm terrible at waking up, half the conversations I had, I don't really remember how I managed to string words into a coherent sentence, never mind find the right doses or choose the right medication.

And yet, here I am now, on the precipice of being done with Sunday. The last day of the week. And when I wake up tomorrow the first thing I will do is change my ringtone from the ugly shrill alarm tone to my old ringtone of Here Comes the Sun. One of the other nurses also had my ugly alarm ringtone today, it's been years since I carried a pager, but all it took was her phone ringing and me jumping in response to remind me that we are no so different from dogs after all, oh so vulnerable to the power of pavlovian conditioning.

But no more talk about pagers and pavlov. This a happy story, or at least bittersweet, because such is the nature of the satisfaction one finds it medicine. Never easily earned. Such that once you obtain it, it is never fully sweet. It often comes with the kind of fatigue, where you just have to turn off your brain and numb your senses, and push through knowing that everything has an end. And in this process of pushing through, sometimes you discover little nuggets of joy, scattered throughout.

It was not the typical nuggets of joy that I have found this week. I am familiar with that kind of joy, the kind that I tend to typically encounter in medicine; a meaningful moment with a patient for instance, a brief expression of thanks. My joy this week could hardly be called joy, it implies some sort of fleeting emotion, rising as quickly as it falls, then soon forgotten. What I felt this week, was far more firm than joy. I felt a deep sense of confirmation, that I am all the things that I often forget I am. I am capable of all the things I set my mind to, and I have always been. There is something deeply empowering about not thinking you can do something and discovering you could do it anyway. And this is the root of confidence. Not the certainty that you will be able to tackle the next obstacle, but instead is it is acceptance of this uncertainty, because nothing is for certain and despite it, you will prevail because you have done so before. Call it a leap of faith if you want, but frankly, what is confidence if not a lie we tell ourselves, an illusion of certainty. And is that lie such an awful thing after all, if it means finding some degree of trust in ourselves?

I am too tired to write more, too tired to keep my eyes open. But rest assured that this not the end. I am slowly discovering a sense of fulfillment in doing things that I didn't think I could do. I am capable. I am smart. And I know that I am more resilient that I think I am. I know that I will soon forget this with the next obstacle I face, but let this be a reminder to not fear discomfort, to always be stubborn enough to want to challenge it, until the lies we tell ourselves just to get by, eventually become truth.