During my residency training I juggled looking after our home and my three kids with no family in Canada (they couldn’t come due to Visa restrictions). There was no money to hire a nanny. I was a student and my husband, although he had been an engineer in Nigeria, he was not yet able to work as an engineer in Canada.

The financial pressure increased as did the pressure to perform as a resident physician doing her family medicine training, rotating through the Intensive Care Unit, Cardiology Unit, Internal Medicine and more.

Learning in a fast-paced hospital environment with Type-A personalities (physicians and nurses), it was hard to switch from work mode to home mode. My  youngest child was 18 months and still nursing when I started my residency program. Sometimes I would walk in the door and she would be literally stripping my clothes off to nurse! And I wanted to continue nursing as long as she wanted it. My other two children were three and five years old.

One of the key challenges at home was caring for the kids. Even when I was at home, my work obligations had to be met. Figuring out a plan for when I could step away to review my cases without worrying about the children became increasingly difficult and stressful.

It dawned on me one day that something was wrong: it was becoming increasingly difficult to get out of bed. I experienced what people describe as being in a tunnel. It felt like I was trapped in a long, dark tunnel with no light at the end no matter how fast I walked. My energy level was going down. I was irritable at home with my husband, but not with my kids. I needed to rest at home but that wasn’t happening. At work I was able to pause (or perhaps ignore) my stress and frustration, but at home it was a constant battle. Although I was still able to be present for my patients, I felt like I was losing myself. I was no longer the person I wanted to be for my kids and for my own happiness and I didn’t know what to do to get her back.

My family practice preceptor was involved heavily in mental health and addiction counselling. One day during my family medicine practice rotation, I was to see a middle-aged male caucasian patient. I knocked, opened the door, barely opened my mouth to introduce myself and he said he didn’t want to see me, the “student”. He wanted to see the senior doctor. I told him I understood and asked him to let me know what brought him in that day so I could pass the information on the my preceptor. He proceeded to share for 5-10 minutes about his mental health issues, then stopped and asked me, “Are you a psychologist?” I smiled and said no, but I am passionate about mental health. His barriers went down and he continued to share about the mental health challenges he was experiencing.

As more and more patients came in for mental health reasons, teenagers all the way to elderly, I was surprised. I expected to see more physical health issues than mental health issues bringing people in to the clinic.

(Once I was full-time in family practice close to 50% of my patients were dealing with mental health issues.)

As with most physicians, our brains are hard-wired to care for others.

We don’t see ourselves as patients, even when the symptoms are screaming at us.

Even though I was struggling mentally with burnout, I was still able to get through my tasks. So I pushed on.

After many weeks of waking up feeling worse and worse each morning, I decided it needed to stop.