Professional and Private life, can we truly separate them?

A few days ago a couple of our friends who happen to be my spouses' co-workers visited us. Here is a conversation that happened.
"The patient had tidal volume down. BP in control, prone ventilation, atrial fibrillation. On epinephrine, pco2 from 60 to 70. Oxygen in monitor at 50. ativan drip, saturation 50, heart rate 100, levofed 150. ARDS and can nothing if she is not responding. She has bed sores. She has AIDS, no WHITE blood cells in the body. Everyone is afraid to touch her for fear of worsening her condition."

This is a very typical conversation when these medical residents meet. It does not matter who else is around them. Their conversation does not go beyond their patients and the hospital settings. I have tried to steer them to other conversation like my favorite team Lakers winning the championship. What I call normal conversation (like everything other than work) is a rarity and is very short lived with these folks which could be testing while others (people not working in a medical profession) are around. I have gotten used to these conversations and actually am amused by their interest in the field. I am also sometimes shocked to hear certain things, but that is beyond the topic of this post.

I am a strong believer in having a private life outside of work. Meaning not to ignore work but there should be boundaries. When I leave work, my other life begins which is interrupted only when things are critical and stressful at work. This enables me to have other wise pursuits in life like watching TV and getting all the exciting world news from The Daily Show by Jon Stewart etc. I can hardly imagine a nerdy tech talk outside work which goes something like this

'The server load had exceeded leading to a network failure bringing the server down. The memory of 8Gigs was not sufficient. So we are trying to double that RAM. But the servers space is limited and server runs of 2000 which is way old. It is time to move to Windows 2008 with .Net framework 3.5 and last but not least it should at least have IIS 6.0. IP v6.0 would be nice but our entire server system has to be changed which is unlikely at this point. On top of it the vendor support is not so good. And the developers produce memory leaking software without any null checks causing the logs to be filled every weak with information about errors. No wonder the business is always behind doing data batch uploads to the database causing bandwidth strain on the database servers. BTW have you tried the new iPhone it is super cool and fast.'

This is the extent of my nerdy tech talk. I think most people familiar with computers can understand most of it but it still is associated with a server admin professional. I cannot have a conversation like that daily after work.

Having said all of this, there are couple questions that should be raised in this context.
1. Why do medical professionals (insert any other profession) invariably return to their work in a casual settings.
2. Can one truly separate Professional and Private life.

The causes for the first question could be multiple. One needs to understand the work setting. In the case of Medical Residents, they spend about 80 hours a week working at the hospital which is double the time a normal person spends at work. This means it takes away 40 valuable hours away from the medical professionals life which could be used for other pursuits outside work. Then there are the stress levels to consider. My job can hardly be considered stressful. There were times they were stressful and I could dream 'if' and 'for loops' in my sleep. Imagine a job where lives could be at risk on your decision calls. That is stressful. The same could be the case with advocates and stock traders etc who spend long stressful times at work. These folks are always thinking about work and they don't have time for other distractions to pursue. A good family atmosphere can alter this, but most medical folks marry within the profession leaving very little room for something else to discuss. Then there is a passion for what you do. Some people are very passionate about their work. Passion is good and necessary if you want to achieve excellence, but it can blind you to others windows of life.

The second part is the separation of Church from the State, I mean professional and private life. I don't think one can truly separate them. If things go bad on any one end, the other is affected. One has to be a machine to block one from the other. Besides people at work are humans after all and friendly relations can be forged with some of them. Every place I left, I took with me a good friend from whom I learned a lot professionally and stay in touch ever so often.

One can and should only strive to seek an optimum balance between work and home. One needs to keep your skills up to date to be competitive at work and also take care of the family so as to not worry about them at work. Taking a break like a vacation once in a while helps. Having hobbies and interests can be effective. Reading, gardening, watching TV and browsing works for me albeit that the latter two take too much of time that could be utilized for more constructive measures like blogging.

Happy July 4th to everyone and take some time off from work this weekend.