Doctors and PTSD – B.C. Krygowski

How I Lost my Covid-15 pounds

People much wiser than myself recommend picking a word for each year. After the dumpster fire of 2020, I decided the word I needed for 2021 was HEALTH. I even wrote it across the top of our wall sized, yearly planner in big, block letters.

At the start of COVID, I stress-lost weight, then immediately gained back more than double. Going into 2021, I was determined to fit back into my clothes again (it’s frightening how living in one pair of yoga pants (or scrubs) lends itself to not realizing you can’t fit into the rest of your wardrobe!).

Here’s the list of things that helped me finally lose weight by the end of 2021. I hope you can find some helpful tips in case, like me, you’d prefer to start using the rest of your wardrobe again:

Why a FIRE Doctor Wants to Continue Working After We Re-enter our New Normal

(FIRE=Financial Independence Retire Early/Recreational Employment)

Why would a FIRE doctor who came out of retirement to work during a global pandemic want to continue working once it’s over?

Glad you asked. 😉

The first two blogs of this three-part series were the most emotionally difficult blogs I’ve written to date. Thankfully, this third blog was much easier to write since I have so many reasons why I want to stay in the medical workforce:

An Inpatient Palliative Medicine Physician’s Experiences on the Front Lines During Covid-19

This 3 part blog series explores the experiences and thoughts for the physician FIRE community on why I left FIRE to return to work due to Covid. (FIRE=Financial Independence Retire Early/Recreational Employment)

In the first blog, I wrote about the difficult decision to come out of early retirement as a Hospice and Palliative Care physician to work on the front lines during a global pandemic. This 2nd blog post details what that return felt like and what I found when I went back into the hospital.

How COVID Made Me Not Go Gently into My FIRE Goodnight

Part One:

Difficult Decisions at the Start of a Global Pandemic:

I want to share with the physician FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early/Recreational Employment) community what my thinking was to leave FIRE and return to work.

In 2019, I resigned from the VA when we moved to Medellín, Colombia, for the summer. After we got somewhat settled in Gainesville in August of 2019, I half-heartedly applied for a part-time position at a local hospice.

But after exploring it, I sensed it was a chaotic work environment and knew my heart wouldn’t be in the job. For that reason, I ended up turning the position as a Hospice and Palliative Care physician down.

I intended to let my medical license lapse while I walked away from medicine completely. One thing made me renew my license, though. Now, this next bit sounds a little woo-woo, but in the interest of authenticity, I’m going to tell you.

Physicians in Transition: Doctors Who Successfully Reinvented Themselves (A Book Review)

“It is unlikely that your actual path through life will match the exact journey you had in mind when you set out. It makes no sense to restrict your satisfaction to one scenario when there are many paths to success.” – Atomic Habits

Fascinating read (Editor’s note: Please be aware there can be affiliate links in this blog, while bringing no extra charge to you, can provide a commission to support this blog)

This post may sound a bit tone-deaf in our current climate, as it explores physicians leaving clinical medicine. However, this blog was written last fall and is only now seeing publication as I have a one week break in my regular (fiction) writing schedule. And judging by the eye-popping number of “I quit” posts from doctors that I’ve seen recently in my Facebook feed—as well as reading a thought-provoking blog by a pharmacist who’s taking a COVID Sabbatical—I decided to go ahead and publish this post.

Shadow Boxing

“The bombs…listen…they’re seven klicks away.”

The night before my Grandpa died, he shared a story from the shadows of his hospital bed: he kept hallucinating about World War Two. Continue reading “Shadow Boxing”