Escaping the Reading Room: One Radiologist’s DDx for Vacations
With summer right around the corner, this author offers key principles for optimizing one’s time off.
There is a bit of Internet wisdom that occasionally floats by on my social media feed, something to the effect of “The goal is to build a life you don’t need a vacation from.”
One doesn’t feel the need to specify goals if they come easily. Songs like “Working for the Weekend” get written and popular because an awful lot of people are just slogging through their jobs to get to time that they can actually enjoy for themselves. I came across an illustrative Reddit post from somewhere in Europe: “The living standard is work yourself all stressed and exhausted until you can afford a vacation for a week. Then back to hell and repeat.”
Folks successfully emerging from med school and internship/residency are primed for this sentiment. They have had at least seven years of immersion (more if you are a a radiologist) in a world that demands far more than a “normal” Mon-Fri, 9-5 workweek with all weekends and holidays spared. The last I checked, house staff get four weeks off per year that are not always timed as they might like it. House staff wages also don’t make for high roller living during that free time.
You might therefore imagine someone in their first post-training year as being shot out of a cannon, having developed a gazillion ideas of where to go and what to do there. Some of these ideas might even be realistic, especially for those who have done some research rather than just fantasizing or hearing tantalizing anecdotes of what others have done.
Alternatively, one might get through those years of education/training by focusing on the here and now, figuring that fun plans for the future can be developed when that future is closer at hand. For example, I completed fellowship and began my first job with six weeks of vacay but had almost no concrete ideas of what to do with them.
There were exceptions of course. Visiting family and occasionally friends who had settled remotely were “gimmes.” Buy plane tickets to get to and from wherever they are, rent a room if they don’t have a spare one, and proceed to enjoy. They know the area around them and are effectively tour guides, activity planners, etc.
Going to CME conferences was another layup. The schedule is set, and the planners typically arrange some extracurricular fun (or at least have some promo materials so attendees have options laid out for them). In my residency, we didn’t even have the task/option of arranging our own travel or lodging. If we wanted the department to bankroll us, all that stuff got handed over to their travel agent of choice.
So there I was, a rad who could newly sign my own reports without anybody overreading, a bit of disposable income, and time to spare. It was years before I built a life I didn’t need a vacation from, and I had enviously watched my non-doctorly friends enjoying their vacations in the years I was cooped up in hospitals. I wanted to make up for lost time.
At that time, I was single, something I didn’t have in common with a lot of others at my stage of the medical career game. Some folks might be comfortable in going to a restaurant and asking for a “table for one,” but I wasn’t one of them. What on Earth would I do with myself for a full week in a vacation destination? I had a friend or two who might occasionally be able/interested in being my travel buddy, but that wasn’t going to be the norm. Faced with the choice of traveling on my own versus taking no vacations at all, I decided I had better attempt the former.
Fortunately, CME conferences had given me opportunity to figure out an alternative to the “table for one” situation. I had stumbled across the solution of sitting at the bar in places that weren’t too crowded and would give me a menu so I could order stuff from the kitchen. Others at the bar are often in a frame of mind to strike up conversations with the strangers around them, and I would routinely go from being on my own to having one or more instant pals.
Even if that didn’t happen, people watching and “dropping eaves” (courtesy of Sam Gamgee/Tolkien) is a fine pastime in most bars with any foot traffic at all, and as a last resort, there are usually one or more TVs around at which one can stare.
While that took care of mealtimes, how would I do for the rest of a solo vacay? I decided the only way to know for sure was to try one. I’m a beach-loving individual so I decided to make things as easy for myself as I could. I picked as close to a guaranteed good weather destination (Aruba) to get away from my winter and booked myself a flight and a room for a week. It worked out even better than I had hoped.
For any singleton rads in a similar position who might be reading, that can be adapted to anything you particularly enjoy, maybe even things you have had a hard time sharing with other folks. If you are a good skier, for instance, and nobody you know can keep up with you or even wants to hit the slopes at all, substitute some snowy mountain for my tropical island.
A few years later, I wasn’t vacationing on my own anymore (although, if circumstances shifted, I wouldn’t shy away from it). As it happened, that gave me a whole new set of things to figure out. Perhaps next time (depending on feedback from this week’s blog), I will share them in the name of provoking some inspiration for your own travels.
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