Sick

I feel miserable and gross and I can't bring myself to get out of bed.

Specific symptoms?

Pyrexia, fatigue, malaise, myalgia, and nasal and sinus congestion. Oh, and of course, guilt.

For the past 4 years, guilt has been a major symptom of every disease that my body (and mind) has encountered and I know I'm not the only one in the medical field who experiences this strange and unnatural phenomenon.

Here's the story: My registrar came to work last week clearly sick. She led the ward round but asked the resident to examine the patients as we are on the renal transplant team and of course, all our patients are immunosuppressed.

Two days later, she was still sick. And two days later, she passed it on to me.

I am now in bed feeling completely miserable and entirely guilty for being too sick to go to work (which incidentally is where everybody else goes when they're sick...).

How sad is it that we live in a culture where doctors are unable to comfortably adopt the sick role when they are genuinely sick?

I'm often told that doctors are not expected to be perfect. We are not expected to be flawless, and we are not expected to be superhuman.

And yet... Are we expected to have superhuman immune systems?

Why does there exist this unreasonable pressure for us to be 100% functional 100% of the time, and when we fall short of that, why is it so hard for us to cut ourselves a break?

As far as I know, doctors are just as vulnerable to illnesses as anybody else and at the same time, we're exposed to more diseases than the average person.

As logic follows then, doctors should literally be the sickest people on the planet.

And when they are sick, it's only fair that they're allowed to appropriately adopt the sick role.

Otherwise, it just seems a little cruel.