About physician sabbatical

 

 

“Your mom has always wanted to travel with her kids. Even before you were born,” my husband told my oldest son recently.

“But how did she know she know if she didn’t even have kids yet?”

“You can have dreams for things even before you know what all the pieces are going to look like,” my husband replied.

 

I wanted to take a big trip with my family even before I met my husband hiking up to Everest Base Camp in Nepal. I knew I wanted to show my kids the world, and share that experience with them. 

 

We had four kids in five years between the last year of anesthesiology residency and the first few years of my attending job, so our traveling then was limited by pregnancy and financial goals. 

 

Traveling with so many young kids also just seemed like a recipe for my true travel fear- four small children with traveler’s diarrhea. 

 

Once I left academics and joined a small private practice, I started laying the groundwork for an eventual “break” at some point. I floated the idea to my partners several years before I hoped to leave to try to anticipate any concerns. 

 

Looking back, I mostly just got lucky with good partners. What I should have done was draft a sabbatical policy to put in writing what I hoped to do. 

 

When my youngest became school age, we started thinking more seriously about what a sabbatical might look like. How long we wanted to be gone, where we wanted to go, what our goals were. This was a continually evolving conversation over many months, and is one reason I believe so strongly in developing your anchors before you get too far into the planning process.

 

We decided our main goal was for the kids to learn another language. Since they take Spanish and Mandarin lessons and we started planning during the pandemic when China and Taiwan weren’t allowing visitors, that left us with Spanish-speaking countries. I had studied abroad in Spain in college, so we settled on a sabbatical in Spain for a semester. 

 

About two years before we wanted to leave, I started contacting people I thought might be interested in doing long-terms locums for our group. These were people who had previously expressed and interest in our town/area, or had done short-term locums for our group previously. The main requirements for me to go on sabbatical were for the sabbatical 1. To not cost the group any money and 2. To not put a heavier work/call burden on my partners. 

 

I was incredibly lucky to find a woman who was interested in doing locums for us to be near her family for a while, and who had done occasional locums for us previously. She was also flexible with her dates of availability. This may seem like a random stroke of luck, but I had contacted lots of other people who didn’t work out also. I cast a wide net.

 

Once I had coverage in place, our planning began in earnest. And the my pre-kids dream of extended family travel started to come true. 

 

I made tons of mistakes with almost everything – visas, finances, gear. This site is the product of wanting to save people a lot of the time and dead ends that I experienced when I started this process. 

 

I hope you enjoy, and I hope you follow along with us on our adventures!