I appreciate it very much when people include me in their blogroll. I'm even more honored when they mention me on their blog. When I do my "blog rounds," I try to leave witty and thoughtful comments. But, for the following two postings, I felt more than leaving comments, I'll talk about it here.
Dinah from Shrink Rap talked about her experience attending the social function of a patient. I really didn't get into my personal thought process when talking about Jen, so I'll talk about them here. (BTW, I forgot to add Shrink Rap to my blogroll, but I'll do it now).
Setting boundaries in your professional life (and personal life) is difficult. There is no magic recipe or book that you can read to find out how and when to do this. Our town measures 16 square miles and has about 16,000 people. This is significantly smaller than the city where I did my residency. So, I knew coming in that I would have to deal with being a small town doctor -- which for all purposes is a celebrity. People definitely know you, know where you live, and know what car you drive. This really disturbed me for the first months I was here, because I was used to riding underneath the radar all the way from high school, to college, to med school, to residency.
It's definitely been a learning process to me. If you met me, I'm a pretty introverted person. And, as you've seen in my blog, privacy and anonymity are important. When I first started working here, I tried to avoid going to big places like Walmart thinking that my patients may stop me, ask me about a medical problem, or ask me to refill their medication. But, a strange thing happened, I learned that for the most part, people in this town respect my privacy and when I'm not "on the clock" conversations have been social and actually pleasant. Of course, there are the few people out there who will take advantage of anyone at any time, but those are few and far between.
At this point, I've accepted the reality of being a doc in a small town and everything that comes with it. It's been a long road, but I've learned a lot about people and a lot about myself along the way.
The Tundra PA has a very delighful post from the "Way Back Machine" -- like from January of this year. The original post is from The Blog That Ate Manhattan and the title is simply "I Love My Blog." TTPA thought that those from Blogaholics Anonymous would enjoy this post, and I agree. Check it out, you'll like it!