No not depressed or ill. I was half way through residency, and along with my wife, also a resident, considering practice options and thinking about what my work life day in and day out would be like, I realized I didn't much want my job for the next 30 or so years. I took a leave of absence, and my wife was just coming off maternity leave with our first child, and with careful thought, I eventually resigned.
What I didn't like about medicine was the ever consistent diagnostic dilemmas (and specifically massaging medically pertinent info out of difficult pts while being empathetic and gauging how they wanted to proceed with their medical care), inconsistent and unpredictable hours, and being on call.
I thought about other residencies with more stable hours, less call, less direct patient contact, but what it came down to was this: I'm rather philosophical about what's important in my life, that philosophy play a large role in my decision making, and it dictated that I do something else. First, financially we were OK because of my spouse's earning potential. Second, we just had a newborn and after the long haul of med school and residency, we were ready to settle down near family, live a real life with real life work hours (not those of a devoted resident). Third, I chose family practice because I (here I stress that this is my opinion not shared by everyone) felt family practice in the most needed, and benevolent specialty and that a good lifestyle, high paycheck, or prestige of choosing another specialty was not important to me. I wanted to do a personally meaningful job.
Thus, moving my family away to pursue another residency was not appealing. There was also no specialty particularly interesting to me. My interest kept returning to clinical pharmacy and thoughts of how I could impact the profession in my region. So yes, it's another 4 yrs of school, and yes I'll be paying more tuition, and yes lots of people have told me I'm crazy and disapointing, including my parents, but my family is not going to starve. We'll get to have the kind of family life important to me and wife. We'll get to live where we want since there is a pharm school locally. And perhaps most important, I'm pursuing this change with an inner drive/interest that I've only recently discovered after drifting somewhat aimlessly through med school.
In short, I know what I want out of life and work more than I have before and my future is in pharmacy and I have no regrets.
