Missionary Orthopod in the Making

Sometimes the amount of suffering the a people can go through, while we sit here in America complaining about dropped calls on our iPhones is overwhelming. Seeing the pictures and hearing the reports makes me wish that I finished my training 7 years ago. I heard on NPR last week that they desperately need doctors who specialize in amputations and crush injuries. While general surgeons certainly fall into that categories I think the orthopaedic surgeons are greatly needed too. I was just reading the blog of an missionary orthopaedic surgeon who is a graduate of LLU and who is returning to be a faculty member at LLU soon on his efforts in Haiti…check it out:http://curecaribe.blogspot.com/. Being in medical school, studying and going throughout my day seems so meaningless while so many out there are suffering, but I suppose that I am much more useful trained than untrained, so I will continue the process.

I’m am halfway through my 6 weeks of general surgery and its not terrible. I have come to realize that I really don’t like operations that deal with the bowel or with the anus.While the operations are certainly techinically challenging, I don’t find them overally interesting and the smell of feces makes me want to leave the OR. Its funny because I was so gung-ho about becoming a general surgeon before medical school and during my first 2 years of medical school because of all that I had been exposed to. In hindsight though I realized that in all of my exposure to the general surgery operations, I somehow managed to not see one single bowel surgery. All the surgeries I saw were traumas to the thoracic cavity, or to the neck, or to the extremities. So once I got on my general surgery service and I saw colostomies being placed and rectal abscesses being drained I realized that I truly am not cut out to be operating on that part of the body. Those operations are vital and certainly they need to be done by skilled surgeons, but it just doesn’t suite my tastes. So due to my new rules of not wanting to deal with bowel or rectums, I have truly officially crossed off general surgery and urology from my list (even though I think the other parts of urology are really cool). This leaves the other surgical specialties to consider which are ophthalmology, ENT, neurosurgery, vascular surgery, plastic surgery. I haven’t really been exposed to these other fields and on first thought, none of them really quite excite me. However I will be spending 2 weeks on neurosurgery when I am done with my 6 weeks of general surgery so I should get to see what their field is like. The more and more I observe and scrub into orthopaedic cases, the more excited I get about the field. So while I don’t mind checking out the other surgical fields left to observe, all of my current moves are towards ortho.

Tomorrow I meet with the program director for ortho to get advice, based on my current stats, CV, projected research, etc. which programs I should choose for my away rotations during my 4th year. Some have said that you have an 85% chance of matching where you rotated so I wanted to make the decision carefully.