Coping

What to do when things do not go according to plan? It is as good a question as any other with as many answers as there are questioners. I do not have much to cope with. For this I am grateful, yet there are a few exasperating things. 

Today I read an article in the NYT concerning the “moral injury” of health care workers, especially doctors. I was one of those once. I did not know there was a name for it other than burnout. I learned to deal with duplicitous administrators and insurance companies. Though caught off guard, I eventually learned to deal with the ever increasing mix of newly minted medication addicts so adroitly created by big pharma. 

 

None of this was easy. I swallowed several generations of anti-ulcer drugs and was glad to have them. If you can remember when the country was not constantly thrown into one fake crisis after another, the by-word was change. Change is what I came to expect. When I first began to practice medicine something substantial changed every 6 months. Then that was halved to 3, then monthly, then I don’t know what. I just hung on for the ride.

 

Like those odd relational questions on the SAT, coping is to change as change is to coping. My mother, in her eighties, decided she did not want to contend with change any more. She was through coping. Though active and mentally sharp until her nineties, she would profess to all her wish to be taken into the great unknown, heaven in her case. This was a downer at our family’s holiday gatherings. She could not be dissuaded.

 

Charlotte and I arrived in Maine in early June. There were two outstanding projects, both of which I had consulted with the boatyard for over a year. There are many projects in the yard. It seems that five new boats are being build. Then there are always a few major refits taking place. Boats must be stored and then un-stored. They need to be prepared for the winter and commissioned for the summer. It is the cycle of a boatyard’s life.

 

Somehow Carrie Rose must fit into the boatyard’s schedule. I wish I could tell you I knew how to do this efficiently. There is no formula. I have tried passive aggression, shouting and swearing, calm retroflection, and appealing to the hierarchy, all have in one way or another failed. I am at a loss and have decided that the only way to cope is through persistence. My hope is that they will decide a better option than seeing me each day is to finish my projects and send me on my way.

 

A valuable lesson that primary care taught me was that logic is not an effective problem solving strategy. To provide logical solutions made me feel better but seldom helped the patient. People are mostly polite, listen carefully as I prattle on, nodding in agreement, and then do none of it. Sobering is all I can say. It taught me to listen to what they are saying and not listen to myself. 

 

So, what have I learned? If the boatyard is doing other things, my thingamajig will have to wait. And if done in duress (aka holding feet to the fire) best to check the project is completed before steaming off into the sunset. In the past I did most things myself. Now after my seventieth birthday, I’ve decided to delegate work and thus must suffer the consequences.