Specialty Search: General Surgery

The months of September and October were definitely a challenge. With the start of my 2 month long surgery clerkship, I knew that I was in for a long period of little sleep, high expectations and little sympathy for my complaints. Although I knew it would be difficult, I had absolutely no idea how to prepare myself. Even though S is a surgeon and he gave me as many pointers as he could, there isn't much you can do to learn the etiquette of an OR without just sucking it up and living through the trial and error.

The first week of the clerkship was kind of a joke. It consisted of lectures, suture clinics and IV drawing workshops. The hours were super easy and I loved every minute of it!

Too bad the easiness didn't last...

The next two weeks, I was on Trauma surgery; one week on days and one week on nights. These weeks were pretty good. The mornings consisted of rounding, upon rounding, upon rounding. Around 1PM everyday, the other med student and I would sneak away from even more rounding to go hang out in the ER and wait for trauma activations to roll in. There were a lot of MVCs, some GSWs, and a few burns/explosions. Overall, it was pretty cool! My week of nights was really awesome; when you are on nights, your team is responsible for everything surgical that goes on in the hospital. So, we covered all the traumas, all the pre-op and post-op surgical patients and anyone coming in with emergency surgical problems that needed to be operated on over night. So, we stayed busy and had a decent amount of responsibility, which is good enough for a medical student. Overall, I enjoyed my time on trauma service, but was ready to really get into an operating room and get my sterilized and double-glove-protected hands dirty with surgeries.

For the next 5 weeks, I spent my time alternating between the general surgery service and the "specialty" services that included plastic surgery, pediatric surgery, orthopedic surgery, colorectal surgery and many more! The first few days were awesome...the surgeries were cool, the gave us a decent amount of responsibility, and the majority of people were welcoming to students, which was a happy surprise on this rotation.

The rest of the rotation can be summarized in the good v. bad.

THE GOOD:
Overall, the cases were very cool. I really really liked the OR. I liked having patients that would come in with problems that you could take into a room, cut it out, sew them back together and occassionally fix the problem. It was a big change from Internal Medicine, in which a lot of the cases I just felt like we were playing a waiting game, without actually helping the patients. So, in that sense, I really did enjoy surgery. I also liked that during surgery, medical students have a job. It might just be cutting sutures, or retracting, or occasionally closing the skin...but we were able to use our hands and be apart of the action.

THE BAD:
While I did enjoy a lot of the rotation, there were definitely a lot of negatives. First, and most obvious, were the horrible terrible ridiculous hours. On a good day, we could show up at 6 AM and would be released by 6PM. However, Wednesdays and Thursdays we would have morning didactics, so we would have to be there and start work at 5 AM. What made this even worse, is that every few days, we were on call until 9PM-ish. I was a lucky student that happened to have a lot of Wednesday night calls. So, I would wake up at 3:45 AM, start work at 5 AM, stay until 9PM, get home at 9:30ish, and would have between 9:30PM-3:45AM to get everything I needed to do taken care of, eat and sleep. Yeah. It sucked. I knew that I could survive that short term, but man oh man I could never be a surgery resident that lived that every day. The second thing I didn't really like was everyone's attitude. Even though the residents and attendings were (mostly) all nice, you could just tell they were angry. It has nothing to do with the individual people...its just the culture of surgery that makes you that way. I know that it doesn't have to be that way and that there are many surgeons that this is not true for...but compared to Internal Medicine, there sure seemed to have a larger proportion of angry surgeons than IM docs. Finally, I didn't love the lack of continuity of care. Yeah, sure...there was some. There were patients that came to the service A LOT...like, several times in the two months that we were there. Also, doctors will see clinic patients, operate on them, and see them again for follow-up...BUT, it just wasn't the same. The care, for a majority of patients, seemed fragmented...and I didn't love that.

So, overall....I did enjoy the rotation. I'm 99.9% sure General Surgery is NOT my chosen field...but it was still a good experience. I learned a decent amount..and hey, you have to go through a lot of specialities to cross things off before you can figure out what you're calling is! Right?

Thats all for now!