So yeah, I kinda dropped the ball on blogging about the end of my general surgery service, but to sum it all up, I am glad it is over, and I hope to never have to do it again. It wasn’t the hours or the people, I just truly did not enjoy what they operated on, and I especially hated being woken up while I was on call to deal with patient A with abdominal pain, or patient B with a rectal abscess, or patient C with cholecystitis.
For the past 2 weeks I have actually been on my neurosurgery rotation. The way that our 12 week surgery rotation goes, is that we do 6 weeks of general surgery, then we do 2 weeks of our choice of either neurosurgery, plastics, vascular surgery, ENT, or pediatric surgery. Then we do 4 weeks comprised of 1 week of ortho, 1 week of anesthesia, 1 week of urology, and 1 week of ophthomology. A couple months back when I had chosen my surgery track, I had picked pediatric surgery for my 2 weeks because I really do love kids. But by the time that I had gotten through my general surgery rotation, and I was surgery that gsurg wasn’t for me, I decided that there was no need to see pediatric surgery since it was the same subject matter as adult but in kids (so appys in kids, hernias, etc.). Instead I decided that I wanted to see something that I would probably never be exposed to again…neurosurgery.
So I just finished my 2 weeks of neurosurgery and I must say that those guys really really really work hard. Much harder than I want to work in life. But to be honest that is not even what turned me off from neurosurgery, it was mostly their patients that turned me off. I have never been on a service that had so many people in a vegetative state. The majority of their patients were in the ICU, and during rounds, the majority of our patient interaction was us screaming into the ear of our unconscious patient “Mr so and so, can you hear me?”…..”Can you hold up 2 fingers?”…..”Can you squeeze my fingers?”. After its clear that the patient isn’t responding, once again, they move on to the next patient who usually is no different. Now of course I did see patients that were pretty sick, and then we discharged home after a full recovery, but it didn’t seem like that was the norm in neurosurgery. But they get to operate on the brain which is awesome, but to me not awesome enough.
Next week I start my 1 week orthopaedics rotation and I am totally stoked (yes I said it, stoked), about it. I really hope to learn alot of orthopaedic physical exam techniques during this week and hopefully I can get to know more of the attendings during this time. Also, this past week I had the opportunity to chat with an ortho resident at Hopkins and it was very informative. I had asked him a bunch of questions regarding their reputation of being malignant, their reputation of being all name and no real experience, their reputation of low operative volume, etc, etc. This resident replied back with the most detailed synopsis of his program I have ever seen, really laying out the pros and cons of hopkins’ program. After reading his reply, I am much more confident that I at least want to check out Hopkins on an away rotation for myself, to see if the rumors are true or not. So that is basically what I’m working on these days, VSAS applications and 3rd year course work.
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