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[quote=Anonymous]What’s it like—well, it depends completely on the specialty and on the doctor, and also on his or her career stage.

My husband is in a specialty and work environment that has regular hours.  (This is the opposite of his late father, who was a private practice general surgeon.)  The flip side is there are few jobs in my husband’s specialty, so when he changed jobs a few years ago he ended up with a long commute.

I think one difference between his job and my non medical desk job is that he does not have as much schedule control.  Like if he wants to take time off, it’s not like he can do the work ahead of time and leave—someone else has to cover him, and that all needs to be worked out months ahead of time.  This need for “coverage” is true in many professions, and not unique to medicine, but I feel like medicine tends to be more short staffed since doctors are expensive.

Also the potential consequences of any slip ups in healthcare have direct human and personal impact, so there is a higher stress level and awareness of liability issues.  For example I often skimped on sleep, especially when we had young kids, but he insisted on always being well rested.

Being around illness and death all day definitely does change people.  Some of the things DH described, back during residency especially, were horrific.  That has two sides; if our kids were injured or something he wouldn’t be anxious or squeamish like I would but he wouldn’t be the person anyone would  go to for empathy either.  When my dad died I was broken; when his dad died he was able to cope much better since for him death was part of life.

We had to move a lot for his training back in the day—he did two fellowships.  Those moves  permanently impacted my career—I ended up in a respectable position, but not in the field I had trained in and wanted to do (I have a PhD, so I too spent a lot of time training.) Since we had kids, I had to stick to really flexible jobs.  We ended up across the US from my hometown.  I think most of these are general dual-career issues and I have made my peace with them—the flip side is that he does outearn me and we have financial stability now.

We live in a VHCOL city and despite dual income, we would not be able to afford significant household help.  We live a normal upper middle class lifestyle.  The rich people are the techbros.

So anyway what’s it like to be married to a doctor—your mileage may vary.  It all depends on the doctor and their specific job and work environment.[/quote]

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