Pumping and crying in a windowless office is not how I envisioned my life at 30 years. I know, wah, wah, wah. A tiny violin is playing in my honor.
I keep saying how hard it is to work fulltime as a new, breastfeeding, mother. But I should be even more specific. It's difficult to be a new mom, breastfeed, pump, bike commute, and carry on some semblance of a normal life with regard to my husband, family, friends, and house responsibilities - all while working fulltime as a fellow. It's one thing to spend 40-50 hours at the office every week, but it's a whole different story to work 40-50 hours/week in a traineeship. It sucks to spend all-day-every-day feeling inadequate, incompetent, inept, and insignificant, and then go home to your family and feel like you missed out on the stuff that really matters.
As a SLP fellow at the Portland VA Medical Center, I am part employee and part student. Because I've earned my Master's degree in Communication Disorders and Sciences, I am technically a speech-language pathologist. But I then need a clinical fellowship year (CFY), where I am required a certain number of hours of supervision, in order to earn my Certificate of Clinical Competence (CCC) through ASHA, the "professional, scientific, and credentialing association" for SLPs, audiologists, and related services. At the VA, a fellow has full supervision/training, much like a medical resident. I work under the instruction/guidance/liability of my supervisors, I do 3-month rotations, and rarely make an official clinical decision without getting it approved by my supervisors. Believe it or not, it's quite a privilege to get hired on as an SLP fellow at the VA. Most of my cohort from graduate school went out and got regular jobs, with periodic check-ins from supervisors from afar. Meanwhile, I'm getting serious training. I'm learning about every aspect of medical speech pathology with the adult population. Which means I'm expected to know things related to our scope of practice - swallowing, language, cognition, speech, voice - but also about respiratory infection, cardiac procedures, cancer treatment, brain lesions, neurological disease processes, enteral nutrition, etc, which contribute to the medical fragility of our patients. In other words, there's a lot of fucking information to learn and put into practice. So that's the student part. The employee part is that I'm paid, expected to be there for (at least) 40 hours/week, and I get a free bus pass.
If I could get over the anxiety of being Debbie Do-Right and worry less about what my supervisors and colleagues think of me, maybe I'd have some room in my brain to actually learn what I feel like I don't know. I suppose I just have to keep in mind that my supervisors have overseen dozens of students and fellows throughout the years. I can't be the most incompetent of the them all. Or can I? Someone has to be the worst, after all. I just don't like the idea that it's me.
And because my constant worry about fucking up has corroded my confidence, I now actually am fucking up. For example, one of my supervisors explicitly asked me to do a few simple things for a patient at the end of the day - calling the team to pass along our recommendations, writing nursing orders for feeding the patient, and signing another chart note. I even wrote these tasks down. Yet I still failed to do them. Instead, I waited until the middle of the following night to wake up in a panic, obsessing over how I'd forgotten. I've even started being paranoid that every time my supervisors talk in a hushed tone or behind closed doors, that they're talking about me. What an airhead I am. How little it seems like I know. How they are confused why I got good recommendations before they hired me. How women with babies are less productive at work. How annoyed they are at having to tell me to do everything, like, why shouldn't I just know more already?
Let's face it, I'm miserable. Mis.er.a.ble. There's nothing quite like feeling perpetually inadequate. I go to work each day, keeping my tail mostly between my legs because I just don't know what I'm doing. Then I go home in the evening, saddened by what I missed out on during the day (Francie rolled over! She took a three hour nap! She did tummy time without fussing!) In order to curb the daily threats of crying on the job, Alex recommended I re-instate my placenta pills. Per advice from our doula, we saved a couple dozen pills for my transition back to work. I'm not confident that eating my own organs will do much for improving life balance, but these days I'm willing to try anything.
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