ANOTHER DOCTOR QUITS? My Thoughts on Kristina Braly Quitting Medicine

Choice, freedom, and flexibility. I could not agree more. Welcome back to the channel, everybody. For those of you who are new around here, my name is Michael, aka Dr. Cellini, and I'm a board-certified diagnostic and interventional radiologist in New Jersey. Now, I just finished filming a video. I closed out of that video, opened up YouTube, and what did I see? A friend of mine, Christina Brawley, anesthesiologist extraordinaire, YouTuber extraordinaire. Did I mention someone I've been following for many years now in this career? She decided that she's quitting medicine, and I haven't watched this video. It literally just popped up, but I had no choice. Turn on the camera, and we're gonna react to it together. Let's go. So, Christina Brawley is an anesthesiologist. Like I said, she's done a lot of stuff on the side, YouTube, started a scrub company, all this other stuff, so I know she has a lot going on. She also has one, maybe two kids. Her husband's an orthopedic surgeon. She has a lot going on, kind of like myself, but I don't know. I need to watch this video. I need to see what's going on with Christina. Maybe I'll text her. Should I text her and tell her I'm gonna react to her video? Maybe I'll do it at the end. Maybe I'll do it at the end. Remind me at the end. All right, let's go. Where's the balloons? I need some balloons, some confetti, some fireworks. I have quit my job as an anesthesiologist. Say it ain't so. It is, though. I have quit my job as an anesthesiologist. As you know, medicine is a changing landscape. The pandemic has shifted everything. I have to say, if there was one field that was incredibly affected by this pandemic, it would be anesthesia. Anesthesiologists had to deal with the airway, of all things, during this pandemic. It was terrible. And also with emergency medicine physicians, who also had to be on the front lines, seeing these patients as they came into the emergency room in the hospital. I can't even begin to even know what kind of stress they endured throughout the last few years. Sometimes places get shut down because of COVID, or there are lockdowns, or things like that, and where you may normally have worked as an anesthesia provider is no longer having cases. Yeah, so like she says, a lot of people may know or may not know that a lot of outpatient places don't really accept any outpatient procedures during the pandemic, which means people who work in outpatient centers, could be an interventional radiologist as well, anesthesiologist, whoever, they don't get paid and they don't work because there's no spot for them in the outpatient hospital, because they're doing no cases, because there are no patients. So yeah. Basically, what has transpired over the past two years is a shift to anesthesia being sort of a mobile job. And this is something that, although I think it's very smart from a business perspective, it's something that no longer worked for me and my lifestyle. So I think what she's saying is, she used the word predominantly in an outpatient setting. And then now that the outpatient clinics were shut down, they had to utilize those anesthesiologists, put them in the hospital or wherever they needed them, essentially, another hospital here, another hospital there, whatever they needed them. She probably took this job to work in an outpatient setting and she's no longer working there. She's being thrown everywhere into crazy cases that she may not be into. So I totally understand this. If that happened to me, I'd be upset too. A bunch of us were asked to be able to move all around the town and sometimes multiple places a day and, or sometimes not knowing where you're going until like eight o'clock the night before. And it might be literally 45 minutes away the next day. And basically I said, no. This is not very similar, but kind of similar. When I worked for that real estate company in Atlanta, before I went into medicine, the reason I ultimately quit was, even though I was planning on quitting anyways, they gave me an ultimatum where they said, we want to move you to another property. And I said, I don't want to move to another property. And I was like, what happens if I don't go? They're like, well, we're going to have to let you go. And I was like, well, I guess you're going to have to let me go. So that's probably how she felt there. And I basically shifted my status from full-time to something called PRN, which in healthcare speak means as needed. I can now work when I want to. I do have more flexibility, more free time to pursue my creative passions. So yes, she quit her job, but she's also doing what every single person, not just in medicine, but every single person has realized that freedom is the only thing that we have. What I mean by that is freedom to do whatever you want, work whenever you want, work as much as you want is like what everybody wants. The hardest thing to do is work a daily grind job like we do in medicine or anybody does throughout the world. But if you can just work when you want, or when you want to pick up a shift here, pick up a shift there, that's the best way to practice. And that's how you avoid burnout. Now, obviously you don't make the same money, but if you don't need the money, you might as well focus on your free time, what you actually want to do with your life and not burn yourself out. Over these past few weeks in my videos, I've been putting out a lot more content lately. I have been happier. I am escaping something that was really dragging me down. Now she's further ahead in her career than I am. So I've only been working as an attending now for what, seven, eight months now, but I absolutely love my job. She sounds like she loves her job, but not at the expense of being thrown into a million different hospitals because that's not what she signed up for. So I totally get this. I think if my job were to be like, we want you to work like an hour down the road and then tomorrow be here, I'd be like, but I didn't want to do that. But she has the freedom to do that because she has another outlet of making income, StrubLine, YouTube, social media. Her husband also works. I mean, this is the best case scenario. This is why I always say you need to have two means of income, not just one, even as a physician, I just realized something. She's actually practicing medicine and practicing as an anesthesiologist the way you're supposed to practice. And what I mean by that is she's practicing a way that prevents her from burning out. She does as little or as much as she wants, and that keeps you loving your job and not hating your job and being overworked. Unfortunately, with things being in this environment where I didn't know where I would be going the next day, I just said, you know what? This was the impetus I needed to move on. And so I am free to do freelance work, which in the medical field is called locum tenens, and it's a Latin term, which I have no idea actually what it means. I didn't know what that meant either to hold the place up. So one of my buddies I was actually talking to as an interventional radiologist, he does locum's work. That's what we call it for short. He just kind of bounces around from hospitals across the state, shout out Kavi, and doesn't have like a full-time set job, just has multiple part-time jobs. And some people love that, and it keeps him kind of wanting more, and it keeps him interested in his career rather than being at the same spot working a mundane job over and over again, overworked, underpaid, etc. I'm all for this. So she's quitting her job, but not exactly being an anesthesiologist as a whole, just she's free. She's free as a bird. Whenever there is a shortage of an anesthesiologist, whenever a facility has someone sick, or whenever they have someone like on maternity leave, or on vacation, I'll go there for either a couple of days, or maybe a couple of weeks, or maybe just one day, and kind of like, you know, show up and be an anesthesiologist, and like, love my job, and love what I do, but have the freedom to say no, and take a job only when I want to. That is the key. Freedom to say no, and take the job whenever she wants to. That's the dream. Freelance anesthesiologist. That sounds pretty cool, actually. It's like an artist, but you're a doctor. That's insane. She must have like a really good practice or something, which it sounds like it, but we can kind of schedule our vacations, you know, a couple weeks, month maybe. The goal has been to really kind of push everything that I do in this space, and even offline. There are a lot of things that I work on offline that I don't talk to you guys about, and I think that that is really kind of taking a front seat for now, and I'm very happy about that, because that's what I've wanted to do for a very long time. The best way to love your job is to not overwork yourself to death while doing it, because I keep reiterating this. This is like the dream here. I always say I'll never quit medicine as a whole, but eventually as I get older, I'll probably go to part-time, because imagine if you were an interventional radiologist, only going in like once, maybe twice a week, never taking call. You just go in, do your procedures, you help your patients, and then you go home. That's what everybody wants in medicine, but unfortunately we have to kind of burn ourselves out to get there. What I found I was chafing against was sort of the rigidity of the job itself, in terms of like absolutely having no flexibility to do this or that, and I was really struggling with those in terms of being able to do what I want to do creatively. I think I totally feel her. I mean, if she didn't really have time to work on YouTube or her scrub line or whatever she's doing creatively, that kind of gets suppressed, and you want to have that creative outlet, and if you can't do it, it kind of just bottles itself up, and it makes you resent your job. So I totally get it. If she wasn't allowed the flexibility at her job, and now she has the flexibility to do all of her creative things and get that stuff from being repressed in her mind, it's going to be a lot better for her. She seems happier already. Okay, this will apply to any job, not just the field of anesthesia. Yeah, that's the crazy part, right? Because you see so many like YouTubers, comedians, the best part about their job is not having a nine-to-five. It's crazy how this is like the way our generation is growing. I think the pandemic has really affected a lot of people, but particularly healthcare workers. Nurses, techs, doctors, surgeons, anesthesiologists, CRNAs, AAs, all of us, we have been really, really, really hit hard. Yeah, I totally agree with that. I think healthcare workers obviously more so than most other fields outside of medicine, I mean. A lot of other fields were home or working from home or just had a leave of absence from their job, while healthcare workers were like working extra long hours in full PPE, walking into the unknown at all times, constantly stressed out. It was a very tough last few years for healthcare workers. When I was administering anesthesia hands-on myself, I am happy. I love it. I absolutely, it's like the biggest privilege and honor. She sounds just like me. This is exactly true, you know what I mean? Like practicing medicine in its truest form, in your specialty, is exactly what we're trained to do and that's exactly what we want to do. The problem as all healthcare workers experience, there's a lot of other issues and other factors that come into play at our jobs. So if you can just focus on that one thing that we all want to do, kudos to her. I want to create things. I want to create content. I love creating, whether it's virtual content or whether it's products. Like I just, there's so much I have in my head and I just need to pick out of the air in my, in this cloud above me. It sounds like me, when I'm like in the shower or when I go to sleep at night, my head is like constantly thinking about stuff that like I want to do videos on, I want to do content, I want to do this, I want to do that. It's like never sleeps, probably why I don't sleep that well, but totally feel her and that's the problem with people who have that creative gene in their head, just never sleeps. But I'm not quitting medicine because I love my job. All right, so that officially concludes this video. Shout out to Christina Brawley for quitting her job, being more free, taking your job in your own hands. I think that's what everybody wants to do. So kudos to you for that. Super pumped for you. That's awesome. So as always, make sure you smash the like, subscribe button, follow me on Instagram, and I'll see you all on the next video. Bye.