I understand how stupid my post sounds, but its tough when you don't know how to proceed.
Not at all stupid in any way to ask for advice before you dive in. But: be teachable.
Any way you can give more details about some of the best experiences that made you decide to switch?
Getting excited about medicine is the easy part. The hard part is avoiding being overly delusional when under the best of circumstances you're really guessing.
I've talked to several physicians. One was telling me about how rough things were when he first started. lawsuits, wanting to leave the city, etc.
Name a mood or attitude or level of job satisfaction and you can find a pile of doctors who have it. The trick is to find out what is true for
you based on flawed information and self-awareness and friends who are actually paying attention and won't lie to you, and honesty about your risk tolerance.
Also, fun fact, a whole lot of physicians have poor perspective on anybody's job but their own, and sometimes not even their own. And the vast majority of docs are active in maybe 5% of the work required to get things done or paid for in a hospital or clinic, so most of what docs say about what's right/wrong in healthcare is myopic and kind of adorable.
I'm probably going to volunteer at hospice. I have a coworker who has been doing it for years.
Sure, do it, but hospice is a wee tiny sliver of the medical pie. Exert yourself to get into a public hospital ED, or free clinic, where you are seeing the patients you'll train on/with. You know nothing about how you like medicine until you're faced with a bunch of patients you'd rather just hate and call it a day. Can you be reasonably sincere in your kindness, and your interest in a positive outcome, for a morbidly obese smoker with a pannus wound that won't heal who is also trying to get IVF pregnant and has no insurance but doc I'm in pain you gotta give me some demerol it's the only thing that works? Gotta go meet your future patients. No other way to find out. And if you can't stand it, that's all you need to know. Even if you want to do teleradiology from New Zealand or whatnot.
And it's been tough to find a physician to shadow.
I got all my shadowing by being a ridiculously energetic volunteer in a public hospital ED who said yes to everything and stayed late and got dirty and held up legs for casting and pushed/washed/retrieved stretchers and rolled bandages, which eventually gave me access to the late night relaxed conversations that the residents have, which gave me names of attendings to shadow, which gave me my shopping list, which got me into clinic offices and a whole lot of ORs. That's how I found out how much I love being in the OR.
If you're
willing to fail at your due diligence, then you'll fail.
And law2doc, I've heard so many different things on what it is like to actually practice that I'm afraid volunteering won't tell me much. For example, I talked to a radiologist who works out of a condo in switzerland.
You have no clinical experience, which means you don't know what you need to know, at all.
You have no clinical experience, so volunteering is all you'll be allowed to do.
So volunteer. Or train to be a nursing assistant or similar so you can get paid a little bit to learn about medicine.
Meanwhile, whatever is currently broken about you gets more broken in med school. Everybody's broken. In med school you get broken in some new ways too. If you can't list about 25 things you really need to be better at for you to feel successful, then #1 on your list is "lacks self-awareness". My point is that whatever prevents you from being happy in your current job
most likely has very little to do with THE DREAM and MEANINGFUL WORK and REWARDING VOCATION and all that stuff. Most likely your general lack of fulfillment (or whatever) at work is about how hard it is to learn stuff you don't want to learn (stuff like how to productively participate in a badly organized meeting), and grow in ways you don't want to grow (stuff like actually working out instead of talking about working out), and be a pretty darned good person pretty much all the time (stuff like being a good mentor anyway to somebody you don't think is deserving of your time). Everything that sucks out your soul about your current job is what you'll find in medicine. The variables are all in
you.
My guess, if your job has you reading ~5 hours a day, is that you'd rather stick an icepick in your ear than have to coordinate meetings or negotiate agreements or talk to the public etc. You don't have to be good at everything to make it through med school and be happy in practice, but you'd better make friends with your limitations and get great at being gracious/grateful to those who don't have the same limitations.
More than anything else, getting good at receiving and learning from negative feedback, and getting people to freely give you that negative feedback, is where you need to be in med school, and my god it's painful to watch somebody learn how to take negative feedback in med school because they didn't learn it before.
Alright, tl;dr: 7+ years of medical training is not a thing to pursue because you think you'll be happier on the other side. Be happy first.
Best of luck to you.
. Some of my friends would also prefer: Careless, brash, bold. 
