Beach Life

Life is good. I'm assigned to a preceptor out on a coastal island for my Family Med rotation and I'm living the good life. The condo they have for us is on the 8th hole of a golf course and a 3-minute walk to the beach. Our practice is open 4 days a week, with about 1.5 hours daily for lunch. Patients come in for routine physicals, respiratory infections, UTIs. I have a reasonable diagnosis without lab tests for almost everyone. People are happy, chatty, going about their lives. At the beach, no less.
It's such a stark contrast to the rest of the year, with its 80-hour weeks, night calls, cancer, stroke, surgery. It's what you thought doctoring might be when you were little--if you had the good fortune to only see the doctor for well-child visits. Patients ask about your family, you ask about theirs. It's sort of lovely. Of course, there's the wrestling with insurance companies who don't want to pay you, patients who don't have the resources (or ability) to take care of their health, and, most importantly, the responsibility for all those lives. Not only that you might miss something acute, but that you're the gatekeeper for everything from high cholesterol (leading to a stroke or heart attack later in life) to diabetes (leading to blindness, amputations) to smoking cessation. It's easy for me, the medical student, to miss out on that part of the picture in the lovely day to day of being here at the beach.
On a more personal note, I'm still every so often sad about Mack, and also sorry that I'm not at home to tend my garden enjoying the harvests that I planted oh. so. long ago and forcing the poor boy to water my extensive plant collection scattered over the ground, deck, and windowsill.