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Workhorse

When your days become all work and no play,  your morale and enthusiasm quickly plummets. I’m currently stuck in one of those ruts where you have disdain for everything - rounding, answering pages, being in the hospital.You begin to wonder why anyone would subject themselves to this kind of a career. Eat, sleep, work and repeat, often times without the sleeping or eating.

Perhaps it’s because of summer and the weather is so nice outside. Maybe it’s third year clerkship burn out. Whatever it is, just got to keep grinding through and hope to make it out in one piece.

Edit: Can you guess which rotation I’m on?

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19 Comments

  1. Gary
    Gary June 23, 2023

    I have no idea how that feels, but I’m sure you’ll be rewarded with lots of valuable experience and insight from all this. Keep working hard, as a med school hopeful I look forward to your posts a lot!

    • medaholic
      medaholic June 23, 2023

      Thanks. I think it’s just my current rotation that has me bummed down a bit. Not enjoying it as much

  2. Josh June 23, 2023

    Sounds like neurosurg…

    • medaholic
      medaholic June 23, 2023

      close, any other guesses

      • Anonymous
        Anonymous June 24, 2023

        Gen surg then. Although I ate lunch in a timely way everyday on that rotation and got a good night’s sleep (well, so long as I want to bed by 10).

        • medaholic
          medaholic June 24, 2023

          yep, hating life right now

          • Josh June 24, 2023

            Hah. We are very different people.

          • medaholic
            medaholic June 25, 2023

            in what respect?

          • Josh June 25, 2023

            Oh, I had a great time on my rotation and will probably be applying to gen surg.

  3. m
    m June 23, 2023

    Biochem/Genetics (i.e. Lab Work)?

    I remember it was one of your bottom five for shortlist year 2 :]

    • medaholic
      medaholic June 23, 2023

      nah, biochem/genetics would be more relaxing. plus it’s not a mandatory rotation

  4. Joshua June 25, 2023

    I was so sure this was going to be Internal Medicine! Sounds like your experience is different from my bro’s - he found surgery to be a “breeze” compared to IM in terms of workload.

  5. medaholic
    medaholic June 26, 2023

    I think there are several reasons why I don’t like my general surgery rotation so far

    1) the culture is really old school, staff never speak to medical students, we aren’t given many learning opportunities, it often ends up being scut work
    2) patient care is substandard. how can you really treat anyone on the ward when you only talk to them for 1 minute at the most while rounding?
    3) waking up at 5am daily gets tiring quickly
    4) workload is actually less than internal or obsgyn imo. perhaps i just don’t find it too rewarding
    5) i don’t really like the OR personally, especially standing for six hr+ cases is not my definition of fun
    6) i’ve had better experiences on subspecialty surgeries… just something about gen surg particularly at my hospital… even the residents in gen surg hate it here

    • Josh June 26, 2023

      Sounds pretty unpleasant. Staff here are great - of course, it’s been different in the past where clerks were given lots of dictations to do and the like, but this has been totally turned around. The only thing that was ever annoying was having to wait around to review with the senior after every consult.

      • medaholic
        medaholic June 27, 2023

        I still think you’re crazy for going into general surgery haha

        • Josh June 29, 2023

          Which is a fair comment… I think I want to do critical care as well, and if I was sure I’d like it, I’d do that through anesthesia…

          • medaholic
            medaholic June 29, 2023

            I did an ICU rotation, and it was pretty much anesthesists, internal med and maybe one ER. pls don’t do critical care through gen surg… hahaha, you would definitely be over qualified

  6. Solitary Diner
    Solitary Diner July 1, 2023

    Your experience on general surgery sounds much like mine. I have never minded working hard, as long as I’ve felt like I was getting something out of it, and that feeling was definitely lacking on surgery. I hated that I had to fight to get into the OR and get any sort of teaching, whereas on internal (my home now!) the residents and attendings loved to teach.

    I guess everyone likes different things and finds a different place where they’re happy (or happy-ish).

    • Josh July 2, 2023

      It’s interesting how much the particulars of the rotation really matter; my OR experience was okay (they usually ensured I could do much of the closure at least), but my residents and staff used just about any downtime to teach, and made sure I was in on other procedures like doing I&D’s in emerg. I guess we’ll see how MTU/CTU goes…

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