So I think that I may have the Orthopedic surgery bug. I’m not sure where it came from but I just woke up one morning sayin, “Maybe I should do ortho.” Now this really actually started to cause me a lot of distress because I tend to have a one track mind, so when I decide to pursue something I really like to see it to fruition. This change to ortho made me nervous. I had to know if ortho was for me before I decided to change my desired specialty track. So I made an appointment to see the Orthopedic Surgery Residency Director here at LLU. The guy was really nice and down to earth. He answered a lot of my questions and generally what I came back with was:
*Orthopedic surgery is a very competitive field to get into (I knew that already)
* You need to get in the 230s on Step 1 to make the cut off for most residency programs and you need to be in the 240s on Step 1 to be really competitive
*You need to have research experience, preferably in orthopedic surgery
*You need to be an absolute superstar for the 4 weeks you have for your Orthopedic Surgery elective
*You need to be in the top of your class
And even after all the information above it is still possible that you may not match simply because there are many top people in medical school classes around the world gunning for Ortho. So yeah, I was a little taken back with how much more competitive Ortho was than General Surgery but I just couldn’t shake the desire to go into the field, so I asked the program director whether I could shadow him to see the types of procedures that he actually did. He was actually performing a hand surgery today, so I woke up early and went in to see him. I actually ended up seeing both a knee replacement and a median nerve repair, both of which were extremely cool. Yes, the resident ortho doctors were quite tall like me and many of them look like they could bench press me, but not all of those residents fit the stereotype. Some were short and skinny, but one thing I must say is that all of them were super nice and all of them seemed super happy with what they were doing. So yeah, so far Ortho seems like the residency to beat on my list because these surgeries are really exciting and they seem to improve the quality of life of your patients 10 fold. The only thing I’m worried about a little is how applicable orthopedic surgery would be to rural missionary work. Certainly an orthopedist is needed on the mission field, but their field requires alot of cool power tools and I’m not sure how that would work out in a rural environment. I don’t know, we’ll see.
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