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?
(Visited 716 times, 1 visits today)
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!
Thanks. I think it’s just my current rotation that has me bummed down a bit. Not enjoying it as much
Sounds like neurosurg…
close, any other guesses
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).
yep, hating life right now
Hah. We are very different people.
in what respect?
Oh, I had a great time on my rotation and will probably be applying to gen surg.
Biochem/Genetics (i.e. Lab Work)?
I remember it was one of your bottom five for shortlist year 2 :]
nah, biochem/genetics would be more relaxing. plus it’s not a mandatory rotation
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.
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
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.
I still think you’re crazy for going into general surgery haha
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…
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
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).
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…