Thursday, 8th January 2009
Two Jobs, One Career Decision
The short version of this story is that I was offered both jobs and took the ENT one. That statement doesn’t make for much of a blog posting so perhaps I’ll elaborate.
I woke up Tuesday morning to an email from the BRI offering me a Clinical Fellow (ST1 – ST2) job with the possibility of moving up to the Middle Grade roster if the bosses thought I was up to it when I was there. I was really relieved to know that I definitely would have a job to go home to whilst I sorted out my career but the prospect of six more months of ED was not easy to stomach as I’ve just been feeling exhausted of late, having working so much. I decided to reply to the email and told them that I would let them know for definite if I wanted to accept the job off by this evening (GMT). This would mean that I should know if I had scored the ENT job or not.
Having not accepted the job outright, of course, meant that I was fretting for much of Tuesday (I was worried that they would retract the offer or something!). I didn’t get to bed until quite late again on Tuesday evening as Fi returned home at about 01:00 and had had a really rough day; a three-year old girl from Woop Woop had accidently hanged herself when the cycle helmet she was wearing got tangled in the climbing frame she was on. Not pleasant.
Yesterday was a pretty quiet late shift at work mercifully until just near the end. I had seen a large lady with a liver transplant who had cholangitis – not good when you’re immunosuppressed. She, of course, dropped her bundle 15 minutes before my shift finished so I had to hand her over to the registrar to sort out which I felt pretty guilty about. With hindsight though I’m glad I did. I cycled home as fast as I could (I managed it in less than 20 minutes) and got home about two minutes before my ENT telephone interview started! I’ll tell you this, it’s very odd having a job interview in cycle shorts!
I really liked the ENT consultants and I thought the interview went well. They asked asked me if I would like them to phone me with their decision or would I prefer an email (since they would decide after all the interviews had been conducted). I (stupidly) asked them to email me which, of course, meant that I stayed up for the next hour or so chatting with Fi about the interview.
The good news is that they did offer me the ENT job. I woke up at 06:30 this morning to an email from them. They said that the decision was “unanimous”. Check me out! I was so excited that this marked the end of shift work for me that I couldn’t sleep. I woke up (despite not falling asleep until 02:30) and replied to the email straight away. I then went for a walk to Glenelg to grab a coffee and spoke to my Mum on the phone.
Getting the ENT job has given me a real confidence boost. So much so that I’ve decided not to apply for anaesthetics but to apply for surgical training (with GP as a backup). I will have to try to nail a (very competitive) core surgical training job for two years and then compete for ENT training afterwards. I have never felt so focused on my career in my life and, for the time being, I couldn’t be happier.