Quitting Residency and Finding Fulfillment

Have you ever thought about quitting residency or your medical career, but immediately felt guilty. Do you believe that being a good healthcare professional requires you to sacrifice your own well being to care for your patients? These are some of the major ideas tackled in episode 4 of the Life After Medicine podcast.

This week’s episode features Dr. Jessica Phillips, a fellow residency drop and one of my real life friends! During her intern year of pediatrics residency, Jessica struggled with burnout and suicidal ideation. She was essentially sacrificing her own well-being to succeed in a medical system that emphasizes efficiency over relationships.

Listen in as Dr. Phillips and Chelsea talk about the narrative of self sacrifice in medicine and how it is creating a mental health crisis. They also discuss the tension between being a good human vs being a good doctor, quitting residency, and finding fulfillment after leaving the medical field.

The narrative of sacrifice and suffering in medicine

In the medical field, there is an underlying narrative that being a good doctor requires you to sacrifice yourself. You are rewarded for putting your work, coworkers, and patients before your own needs; you are given social validation for staying later, picking up the slack, and powering through even when you feel sick.

The culture in medicine normalizes prolonged periods of suffering, especially during medical training. Medical school is hard, but just wait until 4th year, you will get a nice vacation. Residency is hard, but just wait until you are attending, things will be better. The entire process of medical training is about delaying gratification for some time in the future, that for most people never comes.

Dr. Phillips spent her whole career sacrificing her time with family, friends and self care. Finally, in residency she hit a point where she said enough is enough. She realized that fully devoting herself to her career was not how she wanted to live her life.

All of this focus on self sacrifice is creating a mental health crisis in the medical field as people are ignoring their own basic needs. Dr. Phillips experienced her own mental health crisis in residency when she has some disturbing suicidal thoughts one night while driving home from her ER rotation. This is when she realized quitting residency and leaving the medical field was necessary for her health.

Why is quitting residency so hard?

Dr. Phillips hit a point of burnout where she was on the brink of suicide before deciding to quit residency. Why is it that things had to get so bad before she seriously entertained the idea of quitting residency? There are many stories that keep us feeling trapped and stuck in the medical field. Most of us build up an identity around being a doctor or healthcare professional that we don’t know who we are without that title and without the profession.

Dr. Phillips also faced some serious guilt and shame triggers around the idea of quitting. She initially went into the medical field to help people. It seemed selfish to quit, especially when there was a shortage of doctors and people needed her help. There was also the financial burden of her student loans keeping her stuck. How would she pay back her loans quickly without making a lucrative attendings’ salary? Ultimately, she realized all of these things keeping her stuck were just stories in her head that she could overcome.

Paying back your loans after quitting residency

For a long time Dr. Phillips worried about the financial barriers associated with quitting residency. She accumulated a large amount of student loans to pay for her medical training. One reason she didn’t leave the medical field sooner, was her large amount of student loans.

However, once she started having suicidal thoughts, she realized that she needed to get out. Sacrificing her personal health or happiness wasn’t worth it. Immediately, she went into problem solving mode for how she was going to pay back her student loans. She started doing income based repayments to pay back her loans and began to feel a sense of inner freedom around her finances.

She realized she was going to have to pay back her loans anyways so she might as well pay them back doing work that she enjoyed doing, instead of work that was causing her to feel burnt out and exhausted.

Finding fulfillment in her life after medicine

Jessica now works for an online medical education company called Medmastery. She gained a huge amount of autonomy and control over her schedule, which she never had while working in the medical field. This job gives her the freedom and flexibility to work remotely, travel the world and live as a digital nomad. Currently she has decided to settle down in Mexico City as her home base, but she is able to regularly make trips home to see her family and go on vacations as she desires.

She is also working on creating her own online business to help pre-meds and pre-health students to determine if the medical field is really the correct choice for them. She loves working one on one with individuals and helping them to create meaningful changes in their lives.

Now that she has quit residency, she is able to be more present in her life and relationships. When she was working in medicine, she spent most of her time dreading work. Now, she is much more present which has led her to a greater sense of fulfillment

Does she regret quitting residency?

One question Dr. Phillips gets asked alot is if she regrets quitting residency or if she plans to go back to practicing medicine. Her answer is NO on both accounts. Working in the medical field would not afford her the lifestyle she wants. She also doesn’t jive with the standard work practices in the medical field.

She doesn’t regret quitting residency for a second it for a second, especially when she sees the huge improvements in many areas of her life. Her physical health, her relationships and her lifestyle and ability to travel have all drastically improved since quitting residency.

Time is the real finite resource in this life. Dr. Phillips wants to spend her time in ways that feel good to her. She wants to be in places she likes, with people she likes, doing things she likes. These things were not possible while she was working in medicine.