From a retired person, I have become part of the world of worker bees again within a period of a week. Now I spend my days in a similar way to when I was not retired yet. I get up at 4 am, do the housework. Instead of leaving for work at around half-past six and doing work before the work day, I now spend an hour or more on my writing and then set off to go to the day job. At least, that is how I have done it over the last few days.
Does it work? It seems to. This morning I wrote another 1866 words for 'Diary of a Female GP' and the total is now 89954 words. All that is left now is to write the epilogue and the back matter, edit the book and export it to Word. Then I need to validate my word count and I wonder how the yWriter 6 word count will hold up against that on the NaNoWriMo website.
Another small excerpt of the book in progress can be found below and I hope you'll enjoy it.
When I join John and the kids in the living room, I reflect on the amount of time I spent with them this weekend. This was an extremely limited amount of time and it makes me feel guilty. These days I only see them at breakfast and teatime and only if I get home before they go to bed. This in turn makes the sensation surface that I am a neglectful mother and am doing them a disservice. Should I not put their needs first? But then, shouldn't I put my patient's needs first too? When I think about it, I realise my kids, husband and patients always do come first. The only person who is an afterthought is me. Not for my kids and husband, but for me.
Fortunately, the kids seem happy and content. Sometimes they complain when I can't be there to do things, but generally the kids appear to be content with how everything is. All four of the children do well in school, make friends well and we are extremely lucky, the kids behave well too.
At the moment they are all absorbed in playing computer games. John is playing on the PlayStation and none of them appear to have noticed my entrance too much. After taking a seat on the couch, I pick up the Kindle and read further in the book I was reading.
Soon it is half-past seven. Time to go upstairs and get ready for bed. Tomorrow will be another early day, my alarm is set for a quarter to four again as always on a workday. At least I only need to work two hours tomorrow. The rest of the day will consist of household chores, shopping and the school run. It will be another start of another week. The same old, same old. New patients, new problems but more of the same anyway. There will be more colds and sniffles, earaches, tummyaches, joint and skin problems. The benefit of General Practice is seeing a variety of problems and a variety of patients. You also are able to see entire families and watch them grow up and grow older. This also means you see the same patients time and time again and they become your friends in a way. And when they get older, the inevitable will happen. Eventually the people you have cared for over the years will die and you lose a friend. Although we learn to not get too attached through time, this will bring the occasional tear to our eyes too. We are not machines after all.
But now it is time to get upstairs, get changed and go to bed. I need to get enough sleep to be able to deal with the coming week.
Joni
No comments:
Post a Comment