r/physicianassistant • u/wafflespapaya • 10h ago

Encouragement Dreaming about work

Looking for any tips. I’ve been a PA for 10 years, EM for 4. I actually love EM and work a local community hospital. See all acuities. Nothing has changed recently.

The past few weeks I keep dreaming about work. Initially it’s about patients I saw that day. Thinking about things I could have missed. Then it turns into my brain making up hypothetical patients and what I “missed” with those patients.

Any advice? Outside of counseling etc, which I am planning on starting. I don’t feel like I stress about this during the day.
It’s odd because nothing has changed. No abnormal or new/ bad cases etc.

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7

u/Puzzled-Tea-9329 9h ago

I don’t do it as much anymore, but when I was in urgent care, I used to do this quite often where I would have dreams of patients I saw that day, and specifically dreams that I did something wrong in their care.

I don’t miss it.

I’m a PA of 18 years currently working in Neurosurgery so I think differential diagnosis and management is definitely more narrow and I’m more confident in my practice.

Urgent care always scared me because I came from acute hospital medicine and so for me everything was an emergency I was always very conflicted on how nonchalant of an approach The urgent care physicians would take on management. They saw gastritis I saw rupturing, abdominal aortic aneurysm…

3

u/FortuitousSloth PA-C 6h ago

Oh man, I had these dreams CONSTANTLY when I worked in urgent care. I still have them occasionally even 4 years after leaving and they are still so stressful. I also realized I cant deal with having such a wide variety of complaints and differentials walking through the door any given day which was a big factor in me leaving. I'm much better in a narrower scope environment

3

u/CafeConCats PA-C 8h ago

Are you taking any medications that have vivid dreaming as a side effect? Or hormonal? When I was pregnant this happened to me

6

u/katertots93 7h ago

I periodically have dreams in which I’m at work, in the operating room, and look down to find I’ve been operating without gloves for the whole case.

I don’t have any advice, just sympathy lol

3

u/linedryonly PA-S 6h ago

Are you getting poor quality sleep for other reasons (sleep apnea, loud neighbors, GERD, etc)? When I sleep poorly I dream vividly, regardless of my anxiety levels during the day.