what's the point?
I saw the meds nurse this morning. She seemed more concerned with whether I was having any negative side effects from the medication, than with whether it was doing anything helpful. When I said I'd been waking up before my alarm, she told me to lower the dose I've been taking. I don't see the point in taking it at all, if it wasn't even working at double the dosage.
When she asked how things were going in general, she assumed that lab work was going fine and was surprised and sceptical when I said I wasn't getting anything much done. Apparently, she's decided that since nobody has directly said anything to me, that I must be doing enough work and my feeling unproductive is just because my standards are too high.
She was willing to listen if I had an explanation for how I could be getting away with doing very little work, but I was feeling so hopeless and disappointed at the lack of trust and understanding that I couldn't say anything. I'm supposed to email her to explain, but it just all seems pointless.
posted by Lucy @ 10:20 AM
7
comments
7 Comments:
Argh! Your meds nurse makes me so mad! Aren't the meds supposed, in fact, to be treating your FEELINGS of unproductiveness (among other things), rather than simply making you more productive? I see why you'd be frustrated, and it would be great if you could let her know how frustrated you feel.
I hope you had some fun in the Big City.
I don't think my standards are that high. I probably am minimising the hour-ish of work I get done each day and I'm not especially willing to give myself credit for occasional bursts of activity, like thursday and friday last week, but I don't think I'm being unrealistic about my usual work habits.
Is arriving at 11.30am or later, playing online games for literally hours a day, postponing experiments for days on end just because I can't be bothered doing them, waiting until 5pm to start the things I absolutely have to do and ignoring the data that's been piling up for over a month, an acceptable level of productivity? I don't think so.
Also, isn't it enough, in any case, that I want to do more, but can't work up the motivation to drag myself out of bed/away from the computer?
I am kind of doubting my perceptions, as always, though.
Margi, you have a blog! yay! I did have fun in Big City, thanks. I would like a second weekend of just doing nothing, though.
Lucy, I totally know that feeling. People used to never believe me when I said I did nothing, got nothing done and didn't want to do anything. Like my friends, I talked about the same data over and over in my departmental talks, but unlike them, I was talking about that because it was ALL I had done where as they talked about the same stuff because all their other experiments didn't work or weren't ready yet. It's easy in grad school to get by for a long while without doing anything.
However, in retrospect, I DID get some things done. After I left grad school, I was suprised when my data made half a paper. So I bet you're right that you aren't being as productive as you know you could be/want to be - but your meds nurse (and you) might also be right that your standards are a little high or you are minimizing the work you DO manage to do.
How I wish I was a person who could take pleasure in the little things in science! Then even if I just ran a DNA gel I could be happy that I didn't run it the wrong way or that my ladder wasn't degraded.
You'll get through this. Maybe listing what you have done each day will help you see your accomplishments and track your progress?
I think my first attempt to post didn't work, so I'll try again --
I'm with you, and the other commenters, that the nurse should take you seriously. Perhaps there's also a work-culture divide that she was having trouble with -- presumably, if she doesn't get her work done, she's in trouble, so she might not have understood that a researcher can get away with a lot more.
I'm not defending her willingness to remain oblivious, but it makes sense to me that she needed some explanation as to your situation.
Lucy,
My husband is a Ph.D biologist. In his 6 years getting his PhD and the 8 years following, I have seen.... at least 5-6 students/fellows go through periods where they were clearly struggling with depression, barely dragging themselves in, doing very little. In each case, their advisor let this go on for months (in one case, over a year), without saying a darned thing.
In the sciences, in my observation, you've got two things going on. First, the PIs are not generally trained in any type of management style, so they honestly don't know what to do when they see this happening. And second, they know that via the grant and dissertation and publishing system, it all washes out in the end. They give people a *lot* of room, because some projects are very start and stop, but eventually some deadline hits them, and they call people to task.
Tell the nurse that. That scientists are often set loose on a long-term project, and the principal investigator doesn't want to be bothered with managing the process, s/he just expects results at the end, without watching every step in the middle. That end is sometimes quite far off, which makes the amotivation problem even worse for people who need deadlines looming to get themselves motivated.
I'm sorry she didn't believe you. She should start from a position of believing at least the basics of what people say about their environments and go from there.
wolfangel, I'm sorry. My defensiveness wasn't meant to be aimed at you.
Thanks everyone for helping me put her comments into perspective and figure out what I need to tell her.
I might try listing everything I actually get done, betty. That's a good idea. I've thought of it in the past, but I really didn't want to see how little I was doing.
Sorry this has been such a pain for you, Lucy. To empathize, though: the meds nurse totally annoyed me last week, and that's why I ended up quitting the Celexa cold turkey. I feel lame about that, but I didn't want to deal with talking to her about it.
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