Sick days
This week I’ve been feeling ill and not sleeping properly from my first night. However on Friday this got to the stage where my head was spinning when I stood up. I did something I’ve never done before and called in sick. Working sole-charge overnight I felt that I would be doing more harm than good if I did have to take a patient into surgery overnight. Or worse if I got into surgery and was unable to continue.
Looking back I realised I didn’t even consider myself here. Usually I will just push through and get better as I get better without stopping. However being ill is not enough of a reason to stop working. Thinking about this many of the vets and RVN’s I know are similar, we get so caught up in looking after our patients that we forget to look after ourselves. In general practice taking a sick day would have meant rescheduling 30-40 appointments, and the rest of the team picking up those that could not be rescheduled. A BVA survey showed 63% of vets have worked when not feeling well enough to do so (https://www.vettimes.co.uk/news/sick-as-a-dog-vet-illness-figures-released/).
It took me four 13 hour night shifts to realise that I needed not to be there and to simply stay in bed. And even with that I felt guilty for doing so. In this case it meant all emergency cases were covered by another emergency vet in another practice increasing their workload. However thinking back if I had stopped sooner – would I have recovered quicker?
I would love to hear your thoughts and comments here.
BVDA Congress
So the BVDA Virtual Conference is coming up on the 23rd of September. I designed and printed a flyer to promote this that was delivered to over 6500 vets and nurses over the last week. This was sent out with BSAVA Companion so hopefully a few of you have seen this. Whilst I am a perfectionist so will never be 100% happy with it, I am still amazed that something I designed has been seen by so many.
Sometimes I find being a perfectionist holds me back, and many of my ideas have never made a public appearance because of this. I think this is also a topic I will write upon as so much to say here….
IVECCS
This weekend has been the International Veterinary Emergency and Critical Care Society online congress. The upside to covid is that this is online so I can attend it without spending thousands on travel and hotels. Plus I do not need to take any time off work. I’ve enjoyed this immensely as I am doing emergency work currently, and it has given me new skills to take back into practice. I still have a lot of lectures to catch up on as unfortunately I slept through a lot of it! I am not starting my week off which will be for R&R to help full recovery. Until next week.
