Meet Tracy
Hi, I’m Tracy Bingaman. I’m a multi-passionate woman who loves faith, finances, freedom, and fun. I spend my days working as a Plastic Surgery and Aesthetics PA & this year is my 10th year in practice! I enjoy my afternoons, nights, and weekends chasing my 5 kids, 2 dogs, and 1 husband. I own The Fulfilled Mom and host Fulfilled as a Mom – a podcast designed for busy working moms in medicine. My goal is to teach others how to go from being stressed out and time deficient to having more time and more money than they know what to do with. I share my knowledge, experience and behind-the-scenes peeks at my life on YouTube at Fulfilled as a Mom!
After walking through burnout and physical illness as a result of the demands of working in a high acuity position as a PA, I was thankful to have made some financial decisions early on in my career and in our marriage that I was able to quit that job and then go on to find one that served me better. There I built better boundaries and created actual work-life balance and harmony. I realized that I was able to do that because we had been diligent and intentional about our finances and now I coach working moms to do the same so they can build lives that they love! When I’m not working, coaching, or parenting I love skiing, reading historical fiction, red wine, tequila, tacos, fashion, and leopard print anything!
My Burnout Story
I am your typical Type A personality. I’m wired for achievement. I was the President of my PA School class. I studied hard, tested well, and thrived under pressure. I was 8 years into my career as a Surgery PA when I started to feel burned out. I began losing interest in going to work, felt disassociated with the patients I was treating, had nonexistent boundaries, and slowly over time I found myself working 60 hour work weeks.
My specialty at the time was robotic urology. I was part of a large inpatient team (14 surgeons, 12 advanced practitioners) at a large university health network, collectively covering 10 offices, 3 major hospitals, and a handful of outlying community hospitals. I was doing a mix of 50% operating room, scrubbing, and first-assisting major urologic cancer and reconstruction operations and 50% inpatient rounding on hospitalized urology patients. I worked in tandem with another advanced practitioner to cover each of these hospitals: arrange transfers, triaging consults, and managing urological patients prior, during, and after surgery.
When I took the job, I was personally covering one hospital for inpatient rounding and one community hospital via phone. By the time I left, I had become personally responsible for 2 main campuses and 4-5 community hospitals on any given day. Our network had seen significant and profound growth due to building and also acquiring/absorbing community hospitals into our network. With this transition, we simply couldn’t keep up with the human resource demands and we didn’t have the man or woman power to cover all the hospitals. My workload began to increase and it was like the frog in the boiling water. Initially I worked 40-45 hour weeks… then I worked 50-55 hour weeks… then I was averaging 60 hour weeks. Our call burden increased from 10 calls in a 16-hour call shift to sometimes as heavy as 10 calls an hour for 16-hours overnight with 12-hour shifts flanking it. I was going days at a time without sleep.
I was working myself to the bone, through a combination of what was being asked of me and my lack of healthy and enforceable boundaries. I started wondering about that tug I was feeling, thinking that there could be “something more” or “something different,” or in my case, “something less” than what I was doing when I started getting sick. I had new-onset insomnia… I wasn’t sleeping. I was running myself ragged and my emotional and physical gas tank was empty. I developed pneumonia and an autoimmune condition (that I’m still navigating).
My Aha Moment
My 2-year old daughter called me stupid. Let me backup and set the stage for you. I was working full time, stacking 12-hour days with 12-hour on-call overnight shifts and another 12-hour day – yep, you did that math right… working 36-hours straight with sometimes only a couple of hours of sleep. I was 24-hours into this 36-hour stretch, having barely slept, on the phone with the transfer center trying to get a patient med-evac’d in a helicopter to our university hospital hub when my daughter wanted to be held. It was 6 am, she was all warm and snuggly from sleep in her little girl pajamas, wiping the sleep out of her eyes. As I balanced my laptop on my knees she came over to me and reached out her chubby arms and said “UP, MAMA.” I said no. I couldn’t hold her. I was so tired, so stressed, so overwhelmed. I couldn’t even fathom pressing pause on charting and returning pages to the ER in order to snuggle my youngest child, my precious daughter, one of my very favorite, and arguably one of the most important humans in my life. Yes, despite all of this, my answer was still no. She looked me straight in the eye and said “Momma, you’re stupid!” Yep, that’s exactly what she said! And you know what?–She was right. I was stupid. I was stupid for sacrificing my health and sanity at the altar of the healthcare system. After speaking with my incredibly supportive husband, who saw that I was drowning, sick, tired, and profoundly burned out, I resigned from my position seven days later.
A New Start
I am happy to say that I have moved on and found a position in an office where I am building a practice, have predictable hours and healthy boundaries, control my schedule, and am incentivized for any extra hours worked. The more I work, the more I get paid. I get a bonus–YAY! This position lends itself to peace and living in alignment with what matters most to me. I have time to care for myself, I’m healthier than ever, and my mental health has improved significantly.
I’m careful not to romanticize quitting. It doesn’t magically fix burnout. It doesn’t give you boundaries or create balance in your life. You still have to do the work, build limits, enforce those limits with yourself and others. You still have to work on yourself, your relationships, and your professional goals.
Trust Yourself
My story is your reminder to trust your intuition. We often know when things are wrong. You know, that feeling we get deep in our gut that something needs to change. And yet we wait. We feel burned out, overworked, and overwhelmed… and yet we wait. We see the fact that we have unhealthy boundaries and it’s hurting us… and yet we wait.
Don’t wait.
Tune in to what your body is telling you.
Don’t wait.
Have the hard conversations.
Take the chances.
Make the choices.
Create change.
You are the master of your own life.
You are your own best advocate.
You know your body, your mind, your spirit.
You know best.
You are the expert of you.
Stop doubting yourself.
You are destined for greatness, health, wellness, prosperity, and peace. If you are walking through seasons that don’t feel the way you want to feel in life, hang in there. Make choices, shifts, and changes to walk out of burnout and into a life of living in alignment and peace.
Talk to me!
If you are looking for more encouragement, advice on how to do less while living in the luxury of knowing your deeply held values, pop on over and check out Fulfilled as a Mom in audio or on Youtube. I love to share the real, unfiltered view of modern working motherhood, warts and all, on Instagram.
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