Why Doctors Should Only Date Doctors
How the NHS broke my heart
The idea of dating a doctor is associated with success and prestige. When describing my doctor boyfriend to my friends I was held to a high esteem. I’d describe him as follows: “He’s an English doctor. Light brown curly hair, blue eyes and the cutest accent. Graduated top of his class and got an honourable mention in his research masters from a great university. He wants to specialise in Tropical Medicine and save lives in Africa and stuff.” Everyone would sit in their jealousy seats and say “Wow! He’s a catch!”. And trust me, he was. The 30 minutes a day he gave to me, he was a catch. But who wants 30 minutes a day, and sometimes even less?
As I learnt through my relationship with a doctor is that graduating and getting to put the “Dr.” before your name is the light at the end of a dark tunnel that lasts about 5 seconds before heading into an even darker tunnel. After graduating from university all doctors need to spend 2 years rotating around different wards and getting a feel of things. They’re given the “easy” basic jobs and sometimes treated like doctor slaves doing the things that the big doctors don’t want to do, and the nurses aren’t qualified to do. These two years of rotation are made worse by inhumane working hours. Night shifts, day shifts, night and day shifts. To anyone outside the medicine world it’s insanity. To them it’s just going through the motions to get where they want to be, or living their dream.
A couple of night shifts here and there, how bad can it be? Pretty fucking bad if you ask me. As a non doctor, my life dating a doctor became a constant planning around HIS schedule. Planning trips around his days off. Making my friends change dates and times of plans so he could meet them and get to know them. Missing things I wanted to do, to spend time with him when he wasn’t working. Andbeing passive aggressive and moody because he couldn’t get his shift changed to come to my half birthday dinner. To me it was one of the reasons the relationship couldn’t work out. To him it, it was the price he paid to do what he loved.
And that’s the thing. They love it. And they’re good at it. A good doctor is one who loves his work and only his work. How can they have time to love you if they’re too busy loving their work? How I’ve worked it out is that the way medicine courses are designed is done in a way that causes medicine students to be completely dedicated and devoted to the profession, those who aren’t don’t make it to graduation. And after all those years of dedication to the course, the relationship is transferred to the profession. I’m not saying this is a bad thing. It’s a vocation. But how ready are you to always be given second preference when the first one is his job?
Why do you think everyone on Grey’s Anatomy dates each other? Hospital incest. It’s because doctors spend the majority of their day with other doctors talking about doctor things and making doctor jokes. And we can’t relate and we shouldn’t have to. Doctors understand each other’s complex timetables, the struggles of working all night and missing brunch to sleep in, working on New Years Eve instead of going to a party, and not feeling like texting after a long hard day of saving lives.
