Well I’ve been pretty terrible at posting lately but what can you say, that is life. For about 3 weeks I have been on my OB-GYN rotation. The way it works here is that you rotate through all the different sections of OBGYN (high risk, low risk, benign gyn, gyn-onc) during the course. I started on low risk obgyn and it was pretty amazing; I came in at like 5 am, saw the mothers that had given birth the day before and then left by 8 am! It was pretty cool interacting with the moms after delivery because they were often in so much peace post-birth. Some complained here and there of lower abdominal pain, but generally they were quite healthy. I still found myself wanting to play with the babies more than the mother so I’m pretty sure that OB is not for me, but the experience has been great. High risk OB was TERRIBLE!!! It was basically Internal Medicine, but this time the patients were pregnant. So I had pregnant patients with gallstones, pregnant patients with liver failure, pregnant patients with a history of seizures, etc. On top of this we would come in at the crack of dawn and leave pretty late. Right now I am on benign gyn and I am loving it primarily because we are in the OR 90% of the time. I find the OR very calming and comfortable, regardless of the surgery that is being done. On the service so far we have done a couple of hysterectomies and the coolest part about this procedure is that they use the da Vinci robot! My attending was really nice too, he let me use the robot for a little bit and let me practice passing the suture from one robot hand to the other inside the patient. Honestly, if I could get paid to work with that thing 24/7 I would be in heaven.
Lately I have honestly been having day dreams about what specialty is right for me. Right now I am trying to decide between General Surgery, Urology, and Orthopedics. I have researched each one out but and I still can’t come to a consensus. My biggest concern is that I would chose a field that is too complicated to be applied to overseas in missionary work. I truly want to be used by God where ever he would have me to be, and I don’t want to be limited in where I can be used by him. Technically, General Surgery is the most useful overseas because in theory you are trained in most types of surgery but that really isn’t always the case. These days general surgeons only really deal with bowel resections, gall bladder, spleens, and hernias. This is because there are so many subspecialists in the field so when you are training as a resident, many of the non-general surgery cases are taken by the fellows. Then, because many people don’t like the limited scope and terrible hours of general surgery, they often end up subspecializing anyway, so when I come back from the mission field, I would need to take up a fellowship. Then there is Orthopedics; I really honestly love the idea of being an orthopedic surgeon. I am big and tall so I fit in in that respect; I also like to use powertools as I work on my car or fix something in my house so in that respect I feel like I fit in. But I don’t think that my personality fits in with the field of orthopedics. I like to play sports but I don’t watch it and I definitely don’t follow it on TV, simply because I have more interests than that. And it seems like that is a semi-requirement (deep knowledge of sports and stats) to get into orthopedics here at Loma Linda. Also, while I could definitely get into the whole “fixing bones thing”, there is a lot of physics involved and I am not sure if I like the amount of physics that I would have to relearn for the field. But it is definitely applicable overseas in trauma situations, but it is definitely the furthest away from being a General Surgeon that you can be also. Then you have Urology; they actually do 2 years of General Surgery as part of their training which is pretty cool. They are also probably the closet to being a General Surgeon while not going into General Surgery because they are trained to work on the bowel for some of their urological procedures. They also have a lot more office based patient contact and long term patient relationships than the gsurg and ortho, which I actually like. They also get to use that million dollar da Vinci robot in their surgeries which is definitely cool to me. And even though I don’t like admitting it, urology feeds my desire to get into something competitive. So technically I am more so trying to decide between urology and general surgery both of which I think I would be perfectly happy going into. And the cool part is that when I talk to some attendings in the Urology department here at LLU, they expressed the same thing: That they liked both general surgery and urology, but decided to go into urology for various reasons. This is starkly different from the ortho attendings and residents who mostly couldn’t stand general surgery. And it doesn’t hurt that urology compensates quite a bit more than general surgery does and you don’t work as hard once residency is done. And urology definitely has mission applications. So I am going to move towards all 3 of these fields and leave my final decision up to what I end up loving during my surgery rotation, but I guess you can kind of see what I am leaning towards already.
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