I forgot how utterly draining and time-sucking a surgery rotation can be.<\/p>\n
I am only on Day 2 of pediatric cardiothoracic surgery, but man Day 1 was a doozy. I rounded at 6:30am, then scrubbed in on two cases. Doesn’t sound bad, huh? Well, each case was about 4 hours long (standing, holding retractors, not getting to really see all that much since the kids are tiny and their hearts are tiny and so the incisions are tiny… even being 2 feet away is sometimes not close enough. And my attending is variable kind\/considerate\/a good teacher and frustrating\/angry\/yelling, which really keeps me on my toes, I guess. \ud83d\ude42 I didn’t get to leave the hospital until about 7:30pm. That’s a long day.<\/p>\n
The surgeries are very cool, and I am excited, in theory, about these major corrections we are able to make to cardiac anatomy that would otherwise be uniformly fatal. But in practice, I really am not interested in being the one to PERFORM these surgeries. I have gotten many comments from attending and residents over the past two years on my "great surgical technique" and "intuitive OR instincts", and I am certain that I could do the job of a surgeon (and make the pay of a surgeon) – but then I would join the ranks of doctors who are unhappy with their career and end up changing specialities (or leaving the medical field entirely) because they didn’t follow their hearts in the first place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I forgot how utterly draining and time-sucking a surgery rotation can be. I am only on Day 2 of pediatric cardiothoracic surgery, but man Day 1 was a doozy. I rounded at 6:30am, then scrubbed in on two cases. Doesn’t … Continue reading