To think being married to a doctor is draining sometimes??

[Bluebluesea321]

I think we might be quite a rare breed but I’m a non-medic (City job) and DH is a doctor. AIBU to find it quite a draining position to be in sometimes?!

He works long hours, as do I, but inevitably our lives revolve around his shifts, whether he’s on call, whether he’s working nights that weekend, whether we can go to so and so’s wedding or will he be working etc etc. Not to mention the fact that when he has been on nights he’s in a terrible mood sometimes for days afterwards and I inevitably end up ‘looking after him’ a lot of the time!

I love him dearly and I’m so proud of his ambition and work ethic but sometimes it is hard! Our life revolves around his work!

I don’t know how two doctors together can manage sometimes as surely sometimes you’d both be working alternate weekends etc.?

Just a bit of a rant anyway and interested to see if anyone shares my pain!!

@Bluebluesea321

I would advise a non-medic partner to make sure your DH isn’t going above and beyond at your expense. It is pretty much the default behaviour. I had the advantage of knowing the culture very well.

"Same can be said for all shift workers, firefighters, pilots, paramedics, a huge swathe of professions."

I would avoid all of those too to be honest. In looking for a partner, even just for dating, I would prefer someone who doesn't work weekends. Having someone to spend your weekends with is a big part of a relationship isn't it and I think one of the things we should be looking for is someone who is available i.e. free at similar times.

Dh was a consultant in the 90's until the years of horrendous hours (100 hrs+/week) led to a total mental breakdown , spending 4 months in psychiatric hospital when I had 2 under 3's dc to look after
He was devastated to have to leave Medicine but his mental health was much more important
Fortunately he was able to retrain in the legal field and is now a Barrister and able to work from home and take days off when he wants as he's self employed ( but he does work bloody hard when there are deadlines) ...I'm a nurse and was able to get a 9-5 job , so we have a much better quality of life now and although he still misses Medicine I'm able to give him a reality check of how it is now!

@DC3dilemma very good point - he definitely doesn’t at the moment but I do think if he wasn’t with me he would be working many more additional hours to try and earn as much as possible!! I do have to tell him sometimes that although that extra shift could be handy for buying x or saving for y, your health and well-being is important and you need time off to relax and spend with family! He does listen

Consultants still work on call, weekends, holidays.

@WomanLikeMeLM. I know but my understanding is that they are treated as less of a dogs body and don’t necessarily have to be at the hospital when on call!

My best friends husband is a consultant. Because of his speciality he’s still on shifts, on-call, weekends etc and inevitably he ends up working Xmas and new year most years. It’s really tough and she hates it but it’s his passion and she has built her life around it.

She says she would never want her children to be doctors but her eldest has just applied for medicine

My husband chose the GP route for exactly this reason. He went into medicine as a career-changer and so qualified when we were already married with one child. Hospital medicine, long term, would have been pretty unsustainable.
I originally worked in publishing but am now retraining and it is bloody hard as life still revolves around the practice, his work pattern and whatever's going on with his colleagues.
I feel your pain OP, but do see it as a trade off as his ambition pays for our lifestyle. I think it really helps to plan out family time when you can - use his schedule. I turned it into a military operation when my husband was working in a hospital - he was a bit resistant sometimes, but I think doctors need to do things that are unrelated to medicine in their down-time to beat the stress and remember what life is like outside the weird world of the hospital. Hope this helps x

Interesting what you say stopyourhavering because I was about to come on and say being a barrister's wife was much the same. DH and I have been married for nearly 30 years and his career took off as dc came. He has always worked 12-16 hour days and never had flexibility. It is non existent in court and big cases require back breaking prep.

When dc came along I gave up work and literally have done all domestic admin and mgt since. He didn't attend parents' eves, when I went into labour at 27 weeks with ds2 he was in court with his clerk outside with a msg to get him to the hospital - he arrived just in time to meet ds2.

When dc were small during big cases he would book into an hotel Mon/Thurs to stay totally on the game and avoid pitential night time wakings. Important when he slept midnight to 5am during those cases. There was one year when he spent longer in NY than in London.

There was no job security (well I suppose there was by the early 2000s but that was because he was by then passing work to others), no pension, no holiday, no sick pay.

I don't think two parents can work at that pace but I went back to work when youngest was at school and took my own prof quals. It was never a problem because we carried equal loads and were a team.

Presently on holiday with the two grown up dc because he's in court and we needed a break.

Make your own life op. It will serve you well. Have seen many marriages break up as dc hit late teens because partners have grown apart largely because mothers have overinvested in dc at the expense of everything else. It is v sad, women in their early 50s now unemployable whose only topic of conversation is their children.

Some of the dc's friends mothers are hospital consultants. They all worked full time when dc were small with nannies at home - had dc in their 30s. They all went part-time when their dc went to high school - none are married to drs. I can think of v few of the dc's friends where the father's are drs.

@Bluebluesea321 Some consultants when on call will basically be full on in hospital the whole time they are on call, working their arses off.

Others, like me, will be at home, doing the shopping, and just taking the odd phone call.

It really depends what specialty you pick.

How you are treated as a consultant also depends on your employer and I think a bit on your specialty. NHS bullying is rife and consultants are not immune - you can be very vulnerable.

DH has a rare eye condition that has been badly managed by his clinic - we went to his appointment ready to let rip at his consultant only to discover she was just as angry as we were, massively overworked, not listened to by management, the whole department was basically sinking and she was just desperately trying to keep it safe. Didn't make us feel much better about DH's lost sight but we didn't rant at her.

Some bits of being a consultant are massively better than being a junior but depending on your hospital, other bits can be awful.

@OhTheRoses thanks and sounds like barristers have similar challenges! I definitely have my own life, friends and career and I don’t plan for that to change so very much hope I won’t be one of those women you describe! Interesting to know though!

@AnnaMagnani interesting, are you able to share which speciality you are in?

@Bluebluesea321 I'll DM you.

On calls for different specialties are wildly different. I was chatting with a cardiologist who specialized in heart failure and he told me he'd picked it because - when you are 30, being up all night doing emergency procedures for acute heart attacks is really exciting, but not so much when you are 60. He'd identified there was massive demand for his subspecialty, and also the hours were better than other parts of cardiology - clever guy.

Acute medicine has a massive recruitment shortage because no-one wants to do the on-calls.

Asking my junior doctors what they want to do, they aren't stupid either - one of them had picked ophthalmology as 'it's mainly office hours, it's clean, there's a massive shortage for it, there's loads of private work'. I must admit, having now spent many many hours sitting in eye clinic, I have wished I wasn't freaked out by eyes as it's really civilized there.

All the ones that want to do GP want to locum as then they can control their hours - no-one wants to be a GP partner as then they lose control of their hours.

And so on. Some people do pick a specialty out of pure love alone - but if that is a highly demanding specialty they need a partner who will faciliate the life. I am fulltime in a 9-5 specialty but no kids and a facilitating partner. Many doctors opt for a 'make it work' choice - for example radiology instead of surgery if you like procedures, you have to think about a whole career not just how much energy you have in your 30s.

I'd imagine that being married to anyone is draining on occasion

@AnnaMagnani I am trying to work it out- was going to say pall med esp as fits with you chatting with HF team but can’t see why you would be in eye clinic.

Genetics?
Haematology at a push?

I am a medical speciality and the shift and on calls are wearing esp as it has continued as a consultant.
I started my career in something that I soon realised was going to be impossible to have any form of life and family so drifted this way but didn’t think it through enough in hindsight.
I’m always torn between telling my juniors to think of this before they commit and not wanting to put good doctors off a career in an area I obviously feel connected to.

Eye clinic with my DH who has v early onset glaucoma. Have spent many many --many- unhappy hours there.

Just as an example of crapness of medicine - DH has had emergency surgery and has been having weekly appointments to monitor his eyes as he lost more vision this year.

I can only sustain taking him to and from clinic by working as a locum where I get paid if I'm there and not if I'm not. My last job where I'm permanent had issues with me having too much time off - some of these occasions were things like my DM nearly dying from sepsis, the death of my FIL and a long period of time off after the death of my DF.

There is no flexibility for a senior employee - I was senior management - at all.

Shift work sucks. I'm the shift worker on this house (midwife). I dropped the kids at school Thursday morning and said "see you Saturday". Weekends are so hard to plan. Off duty doesn't come out early enough to book the better holiday clubs for summer holiday childcare.

I've slept all morning after nights and now in that zombie in between phase and back on nights Monday. I'll be a grumpy cow the rest of the weekend basically. Sometimes feels like weeks before I see dh because if I work the weekend we just hardly see each other.

But on the flip side I love my job and I get more days off a week than I work so get to do a lot of school pick ups and drop offs etc and playing in the park after school. And I'm happy.

All doctors/health care professionals/firefighters etc are a nightmare to live with (speaking as one) - we tend to survive on barely any sleep, mixture of shifts and the knowledge that if you screw up someone can die and it's very hard to switch off when you get home from a bad shift - and people outside don't tend to get it, they can give sympathy and hold you, but they won't get it in the same way that someone else who is fully aware of the situation can be, so it seems like we are shutting our loved ones out.

Yes it's been tough for us - my dh is a surgeon. It was very hard when we had to move house every year when he was an sho and reg. Then again when kids were babies and he worked very long shifts 2 hours away. Better now he is a consultant. The weeks I am alone with kids are draining (1 in 6), but he's able to arrange swaps for important events.

I think there are careers that have a surprising number of hours. I am a vet doing out of hours and on call work in a traditional practice so I work all day and am them on call all night. I work long hours have a lot of pressure similar to doctors, but with the added bonus of you are only in it for the money - really I am not.
DP is a motoracing engineer at a senior level he works some crazy hours a few years ago he went to work on a Thursday morning arriving as normal at 7.45am and eventually came home the next Wednesday at 8pm. He regular works long hours they are all signed out of the working time directive he has lived a lot of his career on express, caffeinated energy drinks and pro-plus.
So you combine our two schedules and it is a nightmare. However, we have one week a year where we go away to a remote location with no wifi or mobile signal and it is marvellous. We walk, talk, eat, drink and laugh just the two of us.

Yes, I concur with the complete break. We spent every August in France from 2003 until 2017. And then when I thought my second career was heading to the sunset, it took off again. DH has managed August in France the last couple of years but I have only managed two weeks.

He has stepped sideways from the bar but still has a fairly demanding schedule but the 12 hour days are about half the year now rather than all year. It's me doing the 12 hour days nearly all year instead - didn't see that happening as we headed to our 60s.

My dh is a gp and it's now all organised so that I know what's happening. He works 75 mins away (did living in the practice area - never again!) so goes away on Monday, back late Tuesday. Usually off Wednesday. Away Thursday, back late Friday. Approx every 5 weekends is on call, Friday pm- mon am.

We get into the swing of it, the practice has a wee flat so he has somewhere to stay. Usually one of his away nights is on call but even if not he has a lot of paperwork and so working those nights means he can get the free Wednesday (the other doctor works Tues-Wed). It's a rural practice with lots of elderly patients which increases his workload but he prefers that to a busy city practice - "Tesco medicine " he calls it.

The trip to get here was long, but worth it. I was teaching during his early career and during GP training was sahm to our 3 kids. I'm now disabled and can't work but do volunteer and the fact he earns enough for us all is a great relief.

My DH is a doctor, I'm a nurse. It was much harder back in the days when he was a registrar and I was still working ward shifts, our kids were small and sometimes we had to hand over the kids on our shift handovers if one was on nights!
He's a consultant now and I only work 3 days a week 8-4 so life is a lot easier. We do have to do a lot of planning around his on call rota but it's a hell of a lot easier now than it used to be.

I think some of the issue is not just the working hours which can be insanely long and encompass nights and weekends obviously, but the headspace issue

For me in a medical hospital speciality I deal with a lot of sock people each shift and make repeated life and death decisions. Switching off from that to come home can be impossible especially if tired and so for spouses I think it can feel we come home but aren’t present iyswim?

I have had times where I wished I could go back into work (would have done as a junior) as being there and seeing how the patient is doing is much easier than being at home and endlessly worrying about it.

My DB is a GP and he has similar issues. Seeing a new patient every ten minutes plus managing endless letters and blood results and upwards of 50 patient contacts each day means he has to try and process his decisions once home at night and my SIL often moans he isn’t with them in spirit.

Loads of jobs are hard and have responsibility and difficult hours.

But there is something specific to medicine (not harder just specific) that makes it a massive challenge to work in and unless you do it or live with someone who does, I don’t think you get it.

@Babdoc your post has really upset me how awful for you both really sorry to hear that