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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

To think I could study medicine aged 48?

201 replies

Nooname01 · 24/06/2015 10:51

Just that really.

I've long wanted to be a doctor but thought I couldn't for various reasons.

I am academic enough (v high achiever, 1st class degree in a different discipline) and we could afford it financially.

Dc would be 16, 14, 12 and 8.

Would I just be too old on graduating though?

OP posts:
Yarp · 24/06/2015 18:42

By the

People are being negative when they are a doctor or they know one!

straighttalker · 24/06/2015 18:44

I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to go with the consensus. You're too old.

I finished my training last year and I'm 36. Weeks of nights and long days Friday/Saturday/Sunday were beginning to get much harder for me.

Foundation training and specialty training are long arduous slogs in which you're moved from pillar to post and expected to put everything secondary to training needs/service needs. A lot of criticism, appraisal and competition.

In the past year, I've worked with two mature entrants who were in their mid thirties and doing their FY2 year. They struggled. They were used to working conditions in other jobs. Perfectly reasonable things in other jobs: not having to get sick leave covered, being able to predict your leaving time, getting your rota more than two weeks in advance, etc etc. don't apply in medicine. They didn't take criticism well, struggled sometimes with existing in a very hierarchical structure with seniors that were more than ten years younger. For this reason, they were generally assessed as being less committed and more stressed than their younger peers.

TTWK · 24/06/2015 19:25

OP, how about homoeopathy? You don't need to know anything about medicine, if fact complete ignorance of science is a positive advantage. You can download a important sounding qualification off the internet in 20 minutes and millions of people out there will actually take you seriously even though you know sod all.

In fact, some of them will be along in a minute to tell me how wrong I am and homoeopath works.

electionfatigue · 24/06/2015 19:44

Nowhere will give you a place. Cut-off is 30 I think, certainly was when I trained - even if it's not written down. you'll be within 15 years of retirement when you qualify and there's no return on the investment. Sorry to be harsh - I'd agree with posters, if you want to work in a hospital (god knows why) there are lots of other things to do.

Pirsy1 · 24/06/2015 19:47

I'm sorry to say this but I don't think it would be a good idea. I will echo what has already been said by many people. I am a doctor and so is my husband. We work in different hospital specialties, and because of our training we have had to live over 200 miles apart for the last 2 years - only seeing each other at weekends. This has put huge emotional and financial strain on our relationship. We don't have any children, but I think it would be completely unworkable if we did. I am moving to be with him soon but we may have to move again in a few years - you have no stability. The early years of training are hard, you work very long hours - many of them unpaid and it's extremely stressful - I will admit I have cried many times at work because of the stress and sheer exhaustion! I have also spent £1000s on postgraduate exams which are mandatory, and in addition to all this you are expected to be involved in audit, research, publications and teaching to prove that you are 'committed' to your specialty. Ultimatell this takes up a lot of your free time. I think many doctors feel disillusioned. I would think long and hard before you embark on this career, there are plenty of other interesting and fulfilling things you could do which would still allow you to have a good work life balance.

SilverBirchWithout · 24/06/2015 19:59

It costs a lot of money to train a doctor, estimated between £300k to £600k to Junior Doctor stage. Although it sounds like a lifelong ambition, I feel YABU to want to take a place of younger applicants who would work for longer to pay back the investment made by us all (through taxes) in an individuals training.

Do you realise quite how tough it is to get into medical school, the ratio of applicants to places his very high?

parallax80 · 24/06/2015 20:01

Don't be put off. Any serial parent can get up in the middle of night and work through the next day. The experience you've gained from bringing up four children will make it seem like a breeze!

I love this. I have an FRCA exam coming up and will let the examiners know.

OP, I really would go with the consensus here, that 48 is just too old. It's not even the medical school part of it (though that can be intense), but the lack of control over working life / location, postgrad exams, fixed leave rotas. In lots of ways these are even harder with school age children than with babies - I have 3 kids all under 3 and while studying for fellowship is hard work for me, as far as they are concerned, any day can be their "birthday", we can go on holiday whenever the rota allows. I have started a job without being given a rota and turned up on the first morning to be told to go home as I will be on nights for the next week. Obviously this will be different as they get older but they will have grown up with it and I will be more senior though give it 10? years and it'll be resident on-call for anaesthetic consultants I bet

paxtecum · 24/06/2015 20:08

So your DCs are 11, 9, 7 and 3 at the moment?

Do trainee doctors work 12 hour shifts and more as well as study?

I would think that you would need to be incredibly committed and dedicate all your waking hours to the course to succeed.
Would you really be happy with such little time left to spend with your young DCs?

SilverBirchWithout · 24/06/2015 20:22

You do realise how hard even doing 5 years at medical school is I hope? My DS has just qualified, a pretty clever person, with an almost photographic memory. But training is hard work and full on most of the time. 5 days a week, lectures and hospital placements, 9 to 5 most days with travelling time to placements. 2 to 3 hours study most evenings, 8 to 10 hours each weekend. Longer study hours during exam times. 8 week elective abroad between years 4 to 5.

And after all that next 2 years as FY1/2 earning less than £30k. It's a wonderful life and career, but not for the faint-hearted and it is all-consuming.

Hi5Hello · 24/06/2015 21:10

At 4am this morning I was facing two parents who were just about to find out the sad fate of their teenage children after a crash... and who I had been operating om one of them for about 3hrs.

Two hours later I was coming home to shower, get my girls up, have breakfast and walk them to school... before crashing out for a couple of hours

... oh and now I am trying to focus on revision for an exam.

Parenting was never this trying hanna or have a missed something?

OP - it is both the most rewarding and most bewildering profession. You push yourself to the limits time and again from the age of 18 (or 48), just to discover for the rest of your life there will be times you are pushed to new limits again and again.

Would I do it again at 18? Oh yes

Would I do it at 40+ with children? No Way

lljkk · 24/06/2015 21:16

What was your first degree in?

There's a desperate shortage for a lot of other medical specialities. I've heard radiology highly recommended by other medical professionals.

expatinscotland · 24/06/2015 21:24

Very true, High5. When DD1 was ill (she had a rare form of leukaemia 3 years ago and died from it), consultants, yes, consultants, were regularly in some areas all night. She had to be ventilated at 11am in ICU, I had the head of gastro surgery come in to examine her after midnight, arriving still gowned up from another surgery, her own cons was there at all hours, she had to have anaesthetists, consultant ones, come in to put her on ketamine in early hours.

Starting out at 48, it isn't very feasible and I'd look at doing something else - another allied health profession or even a PhD in sciences and going into research.

I worked with a woman, a lawyer, who became a biomedical engineer in her 40s.

expatinscotland · 24/06/2015 21:25

Sorry, 11pm, that's when she had to go on vent.

nocoolnamesleft · 24/06/2015 21:29

So, what would you need to do:

1)Establish/gain entry qualifications (the 4 yr GEM schools would tend to want a more recent more relevent degree)
2)Actually gain a place at a medical school - will your family be able to move if the only place you get is at the other end of the country? Because if you only apply to your nearest place, the odds of getting in are pretty well zero
3)Fund the course. You'd need to check against your circumstances, but pretty standard med school course fees are £9000 per year for the first 4 years. That is, of course, separate from text books (expensive), kit (expensive), travel costs etc
4)Get through medical school. Talking to todays's students, their friends doing other courses still get days off etc. Medical school is basically 9 - 5 Mon - Fri in the first couple of years (with quite a lot of extra work to do outside those hours), then when you go clinical the hours get longer and more unpredictable, rotating between hospitals across the region. Oh, and the exams really suck.
5)Survive foundation years. So that's 2 years of being sent to a new job, often in a different hospital (or sometimes GP practice), every 4 months. With little choice about where you go. Needing to very rapidly learn new skills in each of those. Need to leave on time to make dinner for your kid doing GCSEs? Not if a patient got sick at nearly home time. Tonight's your child's birthday? Sorry, the evening person rang in sick. (Yes, childcare gets considered, but the patients have to be treated, and the person who has a toddler to pick up will get higher priority than you). And, of course, your first experience of working runs of high intensity night shifts. In your 50s. When your family could be living hours away. People die commuting in those circumstances...you might not see your family for a fortnight, to avoid dying on the roads.
6)Then you need to get into speciality training (and survive it). That's another 7 or 8 years if hospital, 3 if GP. Even if heading for GP, you'll still be doing those horrible runs of nights/weekends for those 3 years. If hospital, you'll be doing them all through training...whilst changing hospitals up to every 6 months, with ridiculously short notice (don't get me going on my medical staffing department rant). Whilst in your own time spending many hours on eportfolio tick box exercises, and many many many more hours working for some truly horrible exams. Which you will spend more thousands of pounds to be able to take.
7)Yay! You're ready to be a GP, or a consultant. Hate to say it, but that's when it really starts getting crap. The burn out rate is appalling. As is the rate of depression, divorce, suicide...

I currently have a trainee who is 40. So he started med school at 32. He's totally exhausted, compared to his younger colleagues. I have taught medical students in their 30s, who had a science background. It wasn't the academic stuff that caused them a problem. It was fatigue, and having so little control over their lives.

Ultimately, the choice of whether apply is down to you. But if you decide to do it, please go in with your eyes open. And if you really do mean to do this, then you've got better odds of surviving the experience if you don't wait another 8 years....though the impact on your family....not easy.

Supersoft · 24/06/2015 21:33

Have you not thought about doing nurse training instead?

Kundry · 24/06/2015 21:59

nocoolnameisleft gives a very accurate summary.

I'm a 40 year old doctor, no kids, in a specialty with fairly minimal out of hours working and no way would I ever study medicine again. The doctors I know with kids actively discourage their kids from doing it as they feel it is a mug's game - and TBH most of their kids have figured this out for themselves, having watched their parents lives. I am dreaming of early retirement - I don't know a single doctor who will work to 67.

It's not medical school you should worry about (although that is v intense with masses of exams etc) but after. A colleague has just been appointed a consultant - she hasn't lived with her husband for the whole of her registrar training as she couldn't get a job where he lived. So for 8 years she's lived with their son and he's commuted to visit them at weekends. This isn't an unusual situation in medicine.

I'd like to change to GP - but I know at 40 I simply couldn't go back to being a junior doctor, nights, changing jobs every 4 months, masses of exams again. It was awful, grinding and relentless. Depression is incredibly common and I spend a lot of time supporting young doctors who are nearly burnt out.

And that's without mentioning the politics surrounding healthcare at the moment. It's not fun being a political football the whole time, wondering when the next raid on your pension is due, spending £££ on medico-legal cover and being blamed by the general public or management for things that aren't your fault.

onthering · 25/06/2015 02:01

Echoing nocoolnameisleft and Kundry really.

I was on annual leave today. I was at work from 10 until 3. There was a 1-hr meeting I needed to be at for educational reasons (annual leave is irrelevant in such situations) and its the time of year for the endless e-portfolio tick-boxing exercise - since I was in, it was easier to stay and do some of it there.
Then I drove for 5 hours back to where is nominally home. Not a place I get to that often.
This is on the back of being on-call from 5pm Friday to 9am Monday. Friday night was undisturbed after midnight, I had 3 middle-of-night calls Sat night, 2 Sun night. I was working all day Mon and Tues. I was on-call Tues night and up at 3.30am dealing with something.
I am mid-40s and a weird mix of exhausted and wired. I can't sleep now. I have the rest of the week off but I have one of those difficult and expensive (£1200) exams to prepare for. There isn't really any such thing as time off at the moment.
I have no children, this would be impossible if I did. DP is having a tough time at the moment and I can't give him as much time and support as I would like.

None of this is unusual. It is all completely normal for doctors in training.

I started all this late in life, but nowhere near as late as 48. I wouldn't do it again, it is a miserable way to live.

olivaceous · 25/06/2015 02:14

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

Everydayaschoolday · 25/06/2015 02:30

I got to the point in the thread when you said you're 40 now, so 8 years off. You are (nearly) me! I'm 41, engineering graduate, retired from that profession and am raising my family (2 x DC). We're comfortable financially and I'll be ready at 48 for re-training and a fresh career. I'm looking at Radiographer (4 year degree). I think if you're determined to do it, have good family support, are healthy then you have to reach for your dreams. You'll only regret it in old age if you let people put you off, and you're left wondering 'what if'.

Everydayaschoolday · 25/06/2015 02:33

Oliviaceous Probably waiting like me because of the age of her youngest child. I'd like mine to be more independent before I start full time study.

onthering · 25/06/2015 03:21

Radiography is not the same as medicine though. Once qualified as a radiographer, yes you have ongoing training and assessment. But you are not going to be shipped around the country, changing jobs every 4 or 6 months, working for 12 days (some will be 13-hr shifts) without a day off, while having to get through difficult and expensive post-graduate exams. It really isn't comparable.

I did it because I didn't want to live with the 'what if'. In hindsight the 'what if' would have been preferable.

HicDraconis · 25/06/2015 03:50

parallax don't worry about giving it 10 years - I've been a consultant anaesthetist for 6 years and while I'm not resident, I'm first on for obstetrics, ICU, theatres, ED and judging by last night, IV access for the wards when the juniors can't do it at 2am. Working a 10h day followed by a 14h call night followed by another 10h day is still gruelling at 41 (yes, that's a 34h shift in essence) but it's not as bad as the junior years were (Saturday morning through to Monday evening on about 4h sleep total). I'd not want to go through those again especially with children and a husband.

OP, either start now (and accept that you will miss out on far too much of your youngest child's life) or go for a health related alternative. There are lots of hospital based jobs that don't involve medical training.

BytheBeach people are being negative when they actually know what medical training involves. It's easy to say "it's what you want to do, go for it" when you have no idea of how mentally and physically draining it really is.

I'm a "serial parent". I found medicine far far harder than childcare or the interrupted nights that went with small children.

Shonajay · 25/06/2015 03:55

There's an awful lot of focus on money here- when I was late thirties, I seriously considered retraining and doing medicine, self funded, after an inheritance. Who is to know if this is the case here?

I wouldn't leave it any later but you could end up having a shorter but very valuable career, since you came to it with so much life experience and wanted it so passionately. Medicine surely is about quality doctors - or should be. I'm fortunate to have private medical insurance, but after having had cancer four years ago, and being admitted as an emergency, the NHS missed the fact I was on the verge of a bowel rupture- luckily I signed myself out that day and was given an MRI immediately, which saved my life. I didn't see a consultant for the four days I was on the NHS ward, just a junior doctor who promised to return to finish taking my history but never did. Compassion was also severely lacking, and I'm not a difficult patient. I was allowed water to drink, I wasn't hungry anyway due to the nature of my problem, but they did NOTHING for four days.

I say go for it- older doctors can have very different qualities to younger doctors, for whom career progression is (obviously) the priority, whereas if you know what you want to do and are content not to be fighting for places on surgical specialties, you could be an invaluable asset.

Oh and for those saying its competitive to get in to - yes, it is, but self funding changes things a LOT. I'm also a believer in more rigorous psychiatric and social interaction training before places are given- while I was in for four days a junior doctor pulled the curtains round the fifty year olds bed next to me, told her her liver resection had failed and she had a very short time left to live, in under three minutes, without her partner or anyone there for her, then left her crying. My own mother had a liver biopsy with students watching, and while the doctor was doing it he kept up a running commentary of her symptoms, telling his students how bad things looked for her, while I wasn't allowed in to hold her hand. When she returned for the results, again, a bunch of students, and she was told it was terminal.
I'm not directing this at any of you here, but I do feel compassion comes better with age.

HicDraconis · 25/06/2015 04:14

Shona you're also missing the heavy focus on how bloody difficult it is mentally and physically.

OP may make a fantastic doctor - or not, who knows? But we do know that in the process, she may well destroy her family, who will all have to make sacrifices to allow her a chance of achieving it. I'd put my family over my own goals any day (and that's coming from someone whose husband sacrificed his entire career and life to follow me around the country while I trained).

JessieMcJessie · 25/06/2015 05:00

Shona I'm not sure it's just a case of "self funding makes it all better because the NHS is not paying". The OP would be taking up clinical places which would be better used by students who had a longer career ahead of them.

Also I've looked into courses in other health professions that are funded by the NHS and on many they simply don't accept self-funding UK students.