Baby plastic surgeon

Hey y’all!

I have this delightful Muji notebook that I’ve been using to make my to-do list every day (yes, with checky-boxes…residency habits persist). I like that it’s one page for each day, and I like that it has the dot-grid, because that makes it more fun to draw checky-boxes.

At the top, I write “day X” and the date, and then I write what has turned out to be not so much a list of tasks, but more like a brain-dump of ideas, questions, problems, and yes…a few concrete tasks.

Today is day 10. I looked back at my first 10 pages, and overall, only about half of the boxes are checked!!! Resident-me would be APPALLED.

Starting in practice has been exciting and fun but also disorienting. It’s a totally different way of working than what I’m used to—better in so many ways!!—but I’m definitely still finding my footing in terms of how to structure my time and what to prioritize.

I am also trying to learn how to relax. My husband more or less staged an intervention on me over the weekend, pointing out that I need to stop trying to fill every moment of my life with something “productive.” That drive is part of what’s made me successful, but something about the end of residency…feeling like I was trapped and spinning my wheels…left me with this revved-up engine in my brain that I can’t easily turn down, and my husband is right that it’s maladaptive for me to try to do everything, all the time, all at once.

(to be honest, it’s been going on much longer than that…in high school, back when violin was my thing, I had a sign on the ceiling above my bed that said “people in China are practicing”)

Intellectually I know that we humans need room and space to stop and think. To actually recreate, not pretend like your side-gig is actually a hobby. To relax and read a non-productive book and listen to the birds chirping. I know that if I want this career to work for me as a human being, I need to accept that I can move fast and be successful without turning every single moment in my life into a race against myself.

All of which is to say…I’m doing a medium-job of managing the doldrums and slowness that characterize the early days of any new job, particularly for doctors.

In my first two weeks I’ve seen about a dozen consults, and really enjoyed figuring out how I want to structure those encounters and manage the flow of the patient’s experience of our time together. That part has been very rewarding, and a reminder of what I love about this job.

If you take a step back, this job is super weird!!! You, the patient, pay money to spend an hour with me: a stranger you learned about on the Internet. You tell me what you hate about your body in the hopes I can help fix it, and then you get naked and I take pictures of that body part and then I usually also pinch it…AHHH!!

I genuinely feel that one of my strengths is making people feel at ease with me, and it brings me joy when I can make something as scary as this into something at least somewhat pleasant and life-affirming.

Thank you, as always, for coming along on this adventure! I am extremely open to ideas, questions, feedback, all of it - you can reply to this email or you can DM me on any of the internet places :)

Talk soon,
LM

P.S! I am really loving podcasting more and more - if you haven’t listened to Cut & Tell yet, give it a try and lmk what you think!! Recent topics include: what I bought to prep for my first day of work, advice on specialty selection for med students, and an episode on my very first day.

P.P.S! I am continuing to build out my website!! Would love it if you have any ideas or suggestions on how to make it better - I got a spontaneous facebook comment from somebody who noticed it’s actually real and not AI/marketing-team-nonsense and I was SO PROUD!!!