To want to go to medical school at 37?

[MilanHilton]

I’m 37, married with two nursery aged children. Husband and I both earn £45k each so we live comfortably but not well off.

My medical care when I was pregnant was atrocious and the NHS was negligent (they admitted it). Which really got me thinking… I want to be a doctor that LISTENS to women so that what happened to me won’t happen to another lady.

I know I’m old, and coming from a non science background I’ll have to do 6 years in medical school and then extra training to be an OBGYN. Looking at the junior doctor pay bands it is going to take me years to get back to my current salary. Not to mention needing to do shift work and the stress of it all.

Financially it will be a tight decade and by the time I finish uni, the kids will be towards the end of primary so hopefully life will be easier. I’ll be mid 40s when I finish medical school so will still have another 20 years of working still.

AIBU for considering putting my young family through a decade of financial and emotional stress with the hope that I’ll earn more in the future? Is it worth the stress?

AINBU - go be a doctor! You’ll save lives (sometimes)
AIBU - that’s too much work and financial turmoil, even if you become a doctor you’re not going to address the chronic lack of resource in NHS

I don't think anyone is being rude or overtly pissed off. I think they're just not telling you what you want to hear.

Can you work part time and study part time?
Can you train first as an emergency nurse then upgrade.
Can you get funding by training in remote locations?
You might always work part time in medicine.

Clearly I’m just a lazy patronising person. You guys are right, I’m too thinned skin for this
Nobody has called you lazy, or patronising or thin-skinned. The vast majority of posters have just tried to be helpful, even if their advice isn't very palatable.

If I knew I’d get a place in medical school I’d love to do this, for very similar reasons to you. But I’d need to start again with A levels/access courses! Two years, no guarantee of a place. Despite the apparent shortage of Drs, getting a spot is incredibly competitive. My Dnephew volunteered in a hospital for more than 2 years alongside his A levels. His GCSEs and A levels were all selected to set him up to be a Dr. One of his results was a B, and he didn’t get a place. He was devastated. Too upset to re-sit. Turned his back on it all, doing something unconnected now (probably better paid).

I don't think this is for you... you are getting on and students without children who are much younger find medicine gruelling. It's selfish to put your children through that and yes if you were a man, I'd also say that. Also if you don't feel well off on your current income, you are going to find student life very tough.

How old are your kids OP? I think you're going to miss their entire childhood & by the time you qualify they'll be about to leave home & head off to college/Uni themselves. My youngest just turned 16 & honestly the last 3 years he's pretty much been independent & spends most of his time in his room/playing footy/out with friends or friends round here or on his ps4. The childhood years go so fast it seems a shame to miss them imo. We still enjoy nice family holidays together & time together at Christmas/Easter but you'd be working over most of those holidays & maybe unable to afford the nice hols you've become used to. Just my opinion though.

Don't do it. You will get posted anywhere in the region... Your kids will never see you. You will have night shifts to do. Pay is awful. You seem to want to go down the OBGYN route so let's be honest.... For every 10 successful births there is 1 sad ending. Do you really have what it takes to experience that time and time again??

If you really want to be impactful for pregnant women, train to be a doula.

If your heart is in it, and you think you could keep up that intensity of commitment for a period of years then it's doable - hard but doable and there would be a heavy cost to your family life.

I changed career at 40 (to social work) and that worked out fine but it's a much shorter course. However, that could open up roles in something like social prescribing where you'd be working alongside a GP practice.

I’m a doctor and I moved to medicine as a second career
honestly with the conditions as they are now, it’s madness
But if you’ve always wanted to do it then you’ll be that age anyway so it depends how much you want to do it
can you do a shorter course (grad entry) if you’ve already done another degree? Some universities have a lot of mature students and 37 wouldn’t be that unusual there.
However I’d strongly caution against it
I wish I had never done it and most of my colleagues who are younger and able to have left the country

If you want to make a difference, become a midwife. But it's a very different job from
Being a doctor. And you must feel that you have a vocation for it.

It all comes down to childcare OP. A friend of mine did it, but she already had a science to PhD level, so she did fast track medical school @ 4 years. However, she’d built up a lot of savings and her DH was wealthy they could afford a nanny. Without it would have been very very tricky.

There are people who start their medicine degree in the 50's and 60's. You're not too old at all.

I wouldn't listen to the doctors trying to put you off - the NHS or whatever system we have in the future might be different. Also, doctors will always, always be needed. It's guaranteed career and job security, and also makes it very easy to immigrate, should you ever want to do that. There are also private healthcare routes you could go down.

You are unreasonable, however, for referring to studying medicine as "medical school", unless you are in the USA.

@MilanHilton another quite old 'junior' doctor here. med school is the least if your problems apart from the 50k+ of debt you will end up with (will you even be eligible for student loan). the post grad training to become an ob gyn is 7 years + 2 years internship following graduation. during these 9 years you can end up anywhere in the country and life is pretty shit. even as a consultant obgyns work ridiculous hours (half my family are obgyns and they dont have a life) but while in training its even worse. the 12/13 hour shifts, the frequent nights - and no one goes home on time, Trainees stay behind to do extra surgery to ramp up learning. it's tough enough in your 20s, but in your 40s with kids (you will be 47 when you enter trainingeven if you go to med school next year) it's pretty impossible. and I haven't even started with all the post graduate exams AFTER medical school, the appraisals, the audits and research you have to do, all the ridiculous paperwork for training, being continually assessed, the politics etc. don't do it OP.

I feel like I missed my dc’s childhood by doing it and I really regret that now they’re suddenly older

@slore I went to medical school in the UK

Baffling that you think OP shouldn’t listen to people actually doing the training/job describing the system she’ll quite literally be working and training in from the very start. I’m not optimistic of things getting better in my career and I’m younger than the OP and already a senior registrar.

Also medical school is a perfectly acceptable term in the UK! Both academically and in common conversation. What else would you say?

It's not necessarily 6 years of med school if you have a degree in any other subject?

You could study a 4 year graduate medicine course
https://www.worcester.ac.uk/courses/medicine-mbchb
https://www.swansea.ac.uk/undergraduate/courses/medicine/medicine-graduate-entry-mbbch/#entry-requirements=is-expanded
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/med/study/ugr/mbchb/studenthub/stucom/teaching/nonscience

If you TRULY, and DEEPLY want it, then I say go for it.

It's a huge commitment, and there's no guarantees you'll make it through. But if you're desire and commitment is strong enough, anything can happen.

Life is short. Move towards what pulls you.

People are leaving the public sector jobs (all of them, police, doctors, teachers), just step back and think about why that might be

Quite.
I know people who went to medical school in the UK.
I think a lot of teaching hospitals (eg Guys and St Thomas) call themselves "medical schools" or "schools of medicine".

Also, slore, how many people do you know who are starting medical degrees in their 50s and 60s?

Volunteer as an advocate instead. It's not sustainable at your age and circumstances.

Yes why listen to the doctors trying to put you off? What would they know?!
Also, medical school is called medical school. I don’t know why this is unreasonable.

jamsandwich1

Yes why listen to the doctors trying to put you off? What would they know?!

Better to listen to the "Dream your dream and reach for the stars" merchants.

"Live, Laugh, Laparoscopy"
"Operate like nobody's watching"
"It's On Call o'clock (and looks like being so for the foreseeable future)"

People I have spoken to are not wanting to be in medicine anymore, no work life balance at all. You have 2 nursery aged children would you be able to live with the fact that you would not get to spend much time with them?

I actually know someone who did this in their thirties and was aiming at OBS/gynae too for much the same reasons as you OP They are now in a different consultant specialism. They had awful problems balancing family life and the job and their primary aged kids complained that they rarely saw their parent.