At the moment I normally work Tuesday and Wednesday. This week I am working Thursday and Friday, which means that I have just had seven days off. I thought that I would have plenty of time to do all of the jobs that I needed to do, get on top of my blog, catch up with all of your blogs, spend some time in the garden and have some time to myself. How wrong could I have been? The seven days have flown by and yesterday morning I returned to work with tasks on my list 'to do' still waiting to be done. In fact as one job got crossed off another one gets added. Where has the time gone? I could do with a bit more. Maybe just an extra hour or two a day and possibly another day a week.
You have probably noticed that recently I have been struggling to find the time for my blog. This is in the main due to one of the big decisions that I made earlier in the year. I had decided that I would stop practising and look for something easier to do but, a couple of months before I had planned to stop, I was asked to cover maternity leave of two days a week for about a year, I think. After mulling over the offer, I agreed to do it and I now plan to stop practising at the end of the maternity leave. So since the third week in June I have been working a regular two days a week and I am finding it very difficult to get into a routine, as for about twelve years now I have worked as a locum doing a day here and a day there. It was rare for two weeks to be the same.
I used to work mainly for a well known supermarket, which meant that I did a variety of different shifts sometimes long, sometimes short, antisocial hours and unsocial hours, but it seemed to give me more flexibility and time to myself than working the 9-6 that I am currently doing. On the two days that I work I am lucky to have an hour to myself in the evening. After standing for eight hours I am always tired and often stiff, which means that I need to have a soak in the bath to prevent stiffness the following day and I visit my good friend the osteopath, regularly, for her to keep my creaking body in working order. Then there is the thorny subject of varcose veins. I had two removed from my right leg about ten years ago and have continued to make more for which I have had never ending injections. Soon there won't be any veins left in my that leg!
When I decided to accept the offer of covering the maternity leave I was not sure if I really wanted to stop practising. Sitting at home looking for something else to do, in the winter time, in the middle of a recession, did not seem like a very good idea. Now I know that I am definitely going to stop practising at the end of this maternity leave and I shall do so without a backward glance, as I am now certain that it will be the right thing to do. Covering this maternity leave has made my mind up on this issue.
It is now 35years since I qualified, although in some ways it only seems like yesterday. When I look back at how things have changed I can see where the 35 years have gone. When I qualified labels were hand written and the few drug interactions were carried around in our heads. Now labels are computer generated and it is also the computer that alerts us to an interactions, for there are far too many to any individual to memorise. Most of the drugs used today had not even been discovered 35 years ago. The world and pharmacy have changed immeasurably and in some ways not for the better. I am now looking forward to the day when I hang up my mortar and pestle, but until then I can see that free time is going to be in short supply and I am not going to be able to visit or post as often as I would like, especially as I do not seem to be able to write a short post. I hope that you will bear with me over the coming months.
