25 "It's Amazing To Work On Somebody's Intestines" and "Go Camping And Save A Bunch Of Money"

Guest1: [00:00:00] I wanted to do general surgery. I wanted to do terminal colorectal. Believe it or not, it's amazing to work on somebodies intestines and cut it apart, put it back together and it works better than before. In medical school, eyes are not really hot, so you kind of have to go seek it out. So it's kind of this thing where you say, oh, maybe that might interest me. So I sought it out.

Only after I was told by my general surgery attendings that I should not do what they do. They told me, unless you want to give up your entire life that you don't like your family, that you don't like any activities in life other than having your hands on people's guts, you should probably find something else to do, because it's really. It's like a dedication beyond anything else. There are fields within surgery that allow you to be a human, and ophthalmology falls into that category where you can fix things by putting them back together and still be a human.

Just a practical aspect of seeking emergency eye care. Here. You can't go to the emergency room because there are not staffed by ophthalmologists. So you'll get an emergency room doctor saying, well, I have no idea what to tell you about your eye, so you're better off just calling a private ophthalmology practice and asking for the doctor on call, and you'll save yourself the emergency room bill, which is, you know, thousands of dollars for no reason and no care. So, yeah, if you call a private office, even though it's 2 a.m., they'll say, okay, I'll meet you at the office. I'll meet you there in an hour. Here, especially in Texas, it's a heart wrenching scenario where I think at least maybe 40% don't have insurance. So you don't have access unless you pay out of pocket. So access is not easy here unless you have a job that provides health insurance.

So unless you're gainfully employed, you don't have access to steady health care, which also ties you to these jobs that you necessarily may not want to be in because your health depends on it. But because there's a huge recent immigrant population in Texas, mostly from Central America, they don't have the type of jobs that give you health insurance. They're just daily wage, very low wage, and not even contract employee. And if you fall off the ladder when you're fixing someone's roof, well, that's too bad. So yeah, it's it's bad. You know, you often feel like you're trying to be a firefighter and there's a house on fire and you're not allowed to put it out because they didn't pay you. And most of us don't work for ourselves. So we can't just say, I'm going to treat that person. The best thing I've read about all of this is just it's called moral injury and your sort of everyday.

This is why I wanted to do this podcast. Because. I think we all need to be. Sorry. Able to say this is wrong. I didn't realize I would be so emotional. So. Yes, your hands are tied. Despite the fact that this is what you thought you would be doing. And it's only getting worse. So, at this point, I think roughly half of private practices are being bought by private equity. So Wall Street is just like they're buying the houses. And. Ratcheting up the prices. They're buying.

Doctors practices, sort of taking the meat off the bones and. Reselling them, but you become an employee of a private equity. That sort of dictates how many people you see, who you can see. So if you were seeing 50 patients a day, now they want you to see 80 patients a day. And sort of cut the staff, cut the corners, and eventually sort of sell the practice. So there's very little autonomy for you, but you still have all of the responsibility that you feel that you need to do the proper work. I know a lot of us who feel sort of trapped as we think see things spiraling the drain in terms of incentives for perverse incentives, destroying the culture of excellence. I think we all recognize that it's sort of a problem and priorities for a society. It's not that we can't afford it. We certainly can afford to take care of people and properly. [00:05:30][330.7]

Naty: [00:05:36] Hey folks. It's Naty. We'll be back with more right after this break. What the hell is my job? [00:05:46][10.1]

Guest2: [00:05:47] I was actually born in Oslo and my dad was working there in the film industry, but we moved to Florida when I was like four and a half. And my mom is from the Netherlands, but lived in new Jersey when she was young and growing up in Florida. Most of my friends English was their second language. [00:06:04][17.0]

So I went to university in Florida because one of the few good things about the state is they have a scholarship program. So if you stay in state, they will pay for your tuition and they'll pay for your books and things. So basically, like if you were studying abroad, you'd go to a Florida State University campus in Spain or in England. But if you're doing a foreign exchange program, you would go to a foreign university as an international student for a term, a semester, a year. And with the foreign exchange, the scholarship carried over. And so I was able to use my scholarship to pay for that schooling. And then I just I worked like three jobs and got my plane ticket. And then while I was in South Korea, I worked, I did copywriting online, and I also was a like content creator streamer for this K-pop app. I don't know if it's still around, but it was called something like streaming.

And so yeah, I basically like I worked a lot before I went, and then I worked while I was there and then I worked afterwards. So after university, I did not want to stay in Florida. And I had a friend who has family here. And so we visited in spring break during the last year of my undergrad. And so I came here, stayed at their house, chillin on vacation at Mount Hood. We go into Portland and it screams like everything that I want a city to be. So I kind of had a gut feeling that this might be the place I ended up. When I think about places that I want to travel, rather than thinking about not going at all because I'm queer, unfortunately, like, I think about masking and passing and I think about the positives of whatever country that I want to go and see and experience and the cultures these days, I usually try to cut one of the big three costs that I can.

So flight accommodation and then like food, other transportation and so usually can't cut flight unless I have miles accommodation. There's a lot of good volunteer programs out there. I just wrote a blog about my first experience with World Packers, and it's through at least World Packers. It's like 50 USD a year, and then you get access to all of these different volunteer opportunities. Usually these opportunities will provide accommodations in exchange for volunteering. Sometimes they'll provide meals working at a farm. And so then you're just, you know, like in the middle of nature in the country that you're interested in and you're getting to experience life, you know, with these locals, with these farmers, you're getting to learn about the land. And that cuts the cost of accommodations because those are really expensive.

And sometimes it also cuts the costs of meals. And I'm also lucky to have family living in different places in the world. So I'm planning to visit some cousins in Sweden this summer. When I moved here, the pandemic hit and I was very fortunate. I worked as a seasonal photographer at the time and also a freelance copywriter. They didn't really have work during the summer because I was a school photographer, and so they already had a system of, you know, laying off their workers over the summer. They would the workers would get unemployment. And then when the school season came back around, they would be rehired or have more work. And so because of that specific job, I was able to get unemployment in Oregon. I was also able to get food stamps. I moved like three times during my first year in Oregon, but I ended up in a place that had pretty cheap rent. It was like $575 a month or something. And I was getting a lot of unemployment because of the surplus from the pandemic.

And so I was able to pay my rent. I was working Grubhub, I was doing freelance copywriting. I was also doing camera operating for local theater companies here in Oregon. So when I did my undergrad, I got a communications degree and a theater degree. And so with a theater degree, I was, you know, helping theaters live stream during the pandemic. I was doing backstage stuff. I was able to save a lot of money. And then I got my first, like, serious. Real person job. As I say, working for a startup remote freelance copywriting has gotten me this far. It's given me a lot of opportunities, but it's I just see the industry right now paying people less and less and less and relying more on air. Of course, freelancing always has some level of instability, but it just doesn't feel as worth it as it once did to me. And as a building up intuitive traveler, I want something that that is more steady, you know, and that maybe doesn't work the same parts of my brain.

Because if I'm freelance writing and writing for my blog, I'm going to get burned out on writing very easily. I don't have like, every step planned, but in five years I'm interested in starting a phlebotomy program. So learning how to draw people's blood. And Oregon offers a free Building Bridges training program. And so I'm hoping to that to start that in October when I come back from visiting my cousins and volunteering over the summer in Spain. After that, I want to work and just kind of, you know, put my head down and go camping and save a bunch of money. To hopefully next year, move to Europe, maybe move to Sweden, maybe maybe move to Spain. It just depends. And so phlebotomy is something that one the training opportunity would be free for me to get into to. I think it would be really cool. And three like I can focus on my blog alone for like it's a really useful skill to have for people and I'd be helping people. So that's something that also motivated me. [00:12:28][380.1]

Naty: [00:12:29] Hope you liked the episode. Please help us out by rating us, sharing with your friends or buying us a coffee at. Buy me a coffee.com slash. What the hell is my job? It costs us money and time to be here for you at the start of every single week, so please consider supporting us. See you next time. [00:12:29][0.0]

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