Burnout

Teka muna, teka lang/Pwede bang wag na lang?” Bullet Dumas sings in one of the scenes of the film “I’m Drunk, I Love You.” These are lyrics to Sugarfree’s “Burnout,” reworked as part of the soundtrack of this film about unrequited love. The movie satisfies even the most nitpicky of film critics through a well-written script, realistic characters, and a spot-on portrayal of the bittersweetness of unrequited love at an age where everything—experience, belief, feeling, creativity—seems heightened, though fleeting. Burnout is on the soundtrack for a reason: There is an exhaustion in loving without return.

I am familiar with this one-sided love affair: journeying through years of love, initially with optimism and hope, eventually slumping into a dejected acceptance, a learned helplessness. The word “burnout” was first used by Herbert Freudenberger to describe drug dependents who stared blankly at cigarettes until the ends burned out. The imagery is apt. We know the situation is hopeless, and yet we can change neither the situation nor our feelings about it; we stop hoping for change, and merely wait for the next blow. We wait until the last of the flame burns out.

This is my love affair with medicine, and the love affair of so many others who had the fortune or misfortune to wander into this profession. How bright it all seemed at first; how noble to be in such a vocation, to make it through each hurdle to come out a five-star physician. How slowly this optimism is leeched from us—by tiredness, by a feeling of a lack of control, by disappointment, by the emotional demands of caring for strangers—until it’s too late.

Maybe it was doomed from the start. My own personal love affair is with that beast called surgery, and maybe my clumsiness and awkward anatomy should have clued me in. My disproportionate hands, with stubby fingers but broad palms, do not fit comfortably into any surgical gloves in the market. Maybe I should have known. But I was never after what was “comfortable”; I didn’t care about my incompatibilities with medicine, or the fact that though I would have made a good arts student, I could only be a middling student of the sciences. Like an online dater ignoring the red flags of her Tinder date, I pressed on.

Still, maybe I should have stopped sooner. The sleepless nights, the lack of weekends, full days without sleep, the family dinners I missed, should have warned me. But any dreamy-eyed lover underestimates the difficulty of a new affair, and before I know it, it’s seven years since my affair with medical school began and I am no closer to a happy ending.

Many of my colleagues and I are burned out. I, for one, tire myself with the sheer number of articles that I write about being tired. We have abandoned the perfectionism that propelled us into med school in the first place, and have become comfortable with complacency. Burnout is said to be characterized by exhaustion, lack of enthusiasm or motivation, and inefficiency. We are familiar with all three. The stress takes its toll, and we are left wondering what we have done with our youth, rotting inside the hospital when people out there are “living”.

It’s tempting to say that we wasted those years—seven, both in my case and in the case of IDILY’s protagonist Carson.  But the thing about the film is that, unlike its contemporaries—hugot movies railing against loves that don’t last, scripts that use the word “tanga” too many times—it doesn’t talk about years spent loving as years wasted. The seven years were worth it. The cloud of burnout might make it harder to remember the help we’ve extended and the glory of the job, but the years we’ve spent here aren’t wasted, even for those of us who eventually change specialties or quit entirely. As for whether we’ll keep going or not, burnout might make it hard to be objective about major life decisions, but while we’re waiting for the cloud of dejection to dissipate, it’s definitely worth it to stick around a little while longer.

As Carson says, just five minutes more—just five minutes at a time.

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