I only work four days a week (ten-hour days), and I still feel like I have so little time to myself. I have an hour’s drive there and back, and by the time I’ve arrived at my house, I don’t feel like doing anything. I struggle to make dinner for my son and me, and then I attempt to use the rest of my evening hanging out with my kid. Once it is bedtime for him, that’s my cue to also fall asleep. It is next to impossible for me to do anything that I consider a “hobby.”

I feel like all of my coworkers are suffering from burnout. We do our work in a small clinic, and there are only so many patients that we can see in a day. We’ve never had the number of staff we need to accurately assess 50 patients a day, but we do our best. We have a new clinic being constructed, which can’t come fast enough.

With the surge in cases, we see a higher volume of calls from people who are afraid that they have covid. Although many of them have been vaccinated, the second someone sniffles in their household, they are convinced that it is the virus. I wish the media would report each night that if you think you have Covid, you need to take a deep breath and treat it as you would influenza. I’m not saying the two viruses are the same. I am merely being honest in admitting that there isn’t much we can do to treat Covid.

I am ready for the world to go back to normal. I don’t think that’s ever going to happen, but I’m hoping to at least find a new, less stressful career because Covid has made the world of healthcare unbearable.