#i mean obviously i'm in a position of enormous privilege to be having the type of career crises that i'm having

[saintsenara]

How does your adhd help or make more difficult your job as a doctor?

thank you very much for the ask, pal!

obviously, this answer needs to start with a little acknowledgement of my relative privilege when it comes to my adhd.

like many women, i was diagnosed as an adult, but i was lucky enough that this happened when i was still a student [six year degree coming in clutch - the fact that i had to pay for the diagnosis, not so much], which meant that when i qualified and started actually working, i'd had several years of taking medication and coming up with techniques to manage my life. i can very well imagine [particularly because i know so many people it's happened to] how much more difficult i would find doing my job if i had only recently acquired - or was still waiting for - a diagnosis.

as i've said, the reasons for my late diagnosis were primarily gender-related - i'm a cisgender woman, and so even though i have the more "classic", "male" version of adhd [by which i mean that i'm hyperactive, rather than the inattentive-type manifestation of the condition which is presumed - although not, in my view, entirely accurately - to be more common in women] i wasn't screened as a child because adhd was seen as a thing which boys had.

but they're also because the circumstances of my early life - above all, that my family wasn't housing- or food-insecure, and that my parents were able to have a work-life balance because of this - allowed me to cope well enough with the bad parts of being a child with an undiagnosed neurological disability to be extremely high-achieving while at school. i was in trouble all the time - as most of us were - but this was usually because i spent my time in the classroom messing around, safe in the knowledge that i could race through any work last minute and be completely fine. i was my teachers' nightmare, but it was for the extremely chic reason that all the consequences they threatened me with never came to pass. i was told for fourteen years of schooling that the rug was about to pulled out from under me if i didn't buck up my ideas. instead, i got top marks in every exam, i got into an excellent university to study a competitive subject, i got a first in that subject, i have also - as well as my medical training - got a phd, i'm in an interesting and unusual speciality. i have a lot of letters after my name.

this is because i'm astonishingly clever - and i won't apologise for stating that as fact - but it's also due to good fortune. adhd [especially adhd which is undiagnosed until adulthood] is enormously overrepresented in the prison population, among addicts, among those who have no qualifications, among the long-term unemployed. i think it's important to simultaneously recognise that - while i do think of myself as disabled, and i'm right to - i am very, very lucky in the treatment plan and support system i have. i could be in a very different position had even minor things about my childhood changed.

but with this context taken into account... my view is genuinely that medicine is the number one job for the dopamine-challenged.

i'm not going to go into details about my specialism on the public timeline, but it has several aspects which work really well for my brain.

it's usually very fast-paced and unpredictable. like many people with adhd, i am excellent at working under pressure [and i'm great in a crisis] and very much not excellent without it.

but even when we have slower days it still always feels like i'm progressing towards a tangible goal. like many people with adhd, i'm not great at visualising long-term things - i think in the now and the not-now - but my work relates to cases where the long-term goals and outcome are easy to visualise, and i like that.

it's an area of medicine which is, essentially, puzzle-solving, often in creative and novel ways. like many people with adhd, i struggle to maintain focus on tasks which are too repetitive - but i'm also, as we often are, very good at spotting patterns and details, i have excellent intuition, and i'm a very good lateral thinker.

it lets me be on my feet a lot, to be moving around, and to be doing things physically. my fidgeting has really been cut down by the ol' lisdexamfetamine, but the twitchy impulses which remain are channelled very nicely into being able to do things with my hands and have it count towards my workload.

it's very sociable. i get to spend a lot of time just having a natter with the nurses - and i always have someone around to body double with - but i also get to work with lots of other departments and other non-medical professionals, i teach medical students, i present at conferences, and so on. it's very busy, there's always something new going on, and something which interests me is guaranteed to pop up just when i'm starting to get a bit fed up with a sitting-at-my-desk task...

and the "this interests me" point is the key one, i think.

like many people with adhd, my issue isn't a deficit of attention, it's an inability to easily control the focus of that attention. i have a typically low tolerance for boredom, and i find it extremely difficult both to start and to concentrate on enough to complete tasks which don't interest me.

but i like what i do - i find it fascinating - and that means that i have a lot of attention to devote to it. i can't remember what day my bins go out or what my mam asked me to pick up for her from the supermarket, but i can remember endless information pertaining to the human body, no matter how grim the situation that body finds itself in.

it's taken a bit of trial-and-error to get to where i am - i found the surgical rotations of my training really tough, for example, because surgery is a discipline which is very repetitive, and which lacks that mystery-solving element which so appeals to me - but i'm in a place now where i genuinely think that having adhd makes me a better doctor.

and even the night shifts are worth it to not have to work in an office.

[no disrespect to the spreadsheet girlies...]

[cakemoney]

genuinely annoyed that a recession has to come RIGHT when i’m having a real crisis over career directions like seriously? you had all pandemic to tank the economy but NOW is the time?