Summer vacation
Supposedly I moved to Alaska to work. So far, I have behaved more like a tourist, spending most of my time hiking and fishing. It is a great time of year to play tourist in Alaska. These tourist type of activities have been punctuated by occasional reminders -- hospital orientation, credentialing committees, onerous paperwork -- that eventually I am going to have to start working again. This will become a reality on September 1.
Up until this point, I have always worked under the supervision of someone else. The prospect of being out from under that supervision is both exciting and slightly daunting. I am eager for the ability to form relationships and treatment plans with my patients and then see those plans through to completion. As a resident, I was often only involved with a patient at one point along the journey of preoperative care, surgery, recovery, and postoperative care. I am eager for longer term patient relationships.
I am also eager to get back into the OR again and do cases. There is something about being in the OR that gets into a person's blood. Not having worked for a couple of months, I am definitely eager to get back to doing surgery again. It is very gratifying to work through a diagnostic challenge, successfully perform an operation, and then help the person through the postoperative recovery. Ideally it is a very rewarding journey that makes someone else's life better.
However, no matter how good you are as a surgeon, you will have complications. It is inevitable that there will be people who you operate on that are worse off after the operation than they were before. If someone has colon cancer, I can take their colon out, but I cannot tell them with 100% confidence that they won't have a heart attack, get a pneumonia, or have a leak where I reconnect their colon. Some of those patients even die as a direct result of the fact that you did surgery on them. I think that being out in practice on my own now, I will feel a higher level of personal ownership of these complications than I did as a resident.
In any case, it is good to be done with formal training. It was really good to have 2 months of vacation between residency and starting work. However, I am itching to get started and am really hoping that I don't have a perineal evisceration (no, you don't want to know) as my first case like one of my colleagues did who started a month before me.
Up until this point, I have always worked under the supervision of someone else. The prospect of being out from under that supervision is both exciting and slightly daunting. I am eager for the ability to form relationships and treatment plans with my patients and then see those plans through to completion. As a resident, I was often only involved with a patient at one point along the journey of preoperative care, surgery, recovery, and postoperative care. I am eager for longer term patient relationships.
I am also eager to get back into the OR again and do cases. There is something about being in the OR that gets into a person's blood. Not having worked for a couple of months, I am definitely eager to get back to doing surgery again. It is very gratifying to work through a diagnostic challenge, successfully perform an operation, and then help the person through the postoperative recovery. Ideally it is a very rewarding journey that makes someone else's life better.
However, no matter how good you are as a surgeon, you will have complications. It is inevitable that there will be people who you operate on that are worse off after the operation than they were before. If someone has colon cancer, I can take their colon out, but I cannot tell them with 100% confidence that they won't have a heart attack, get a pneumonia, or have a leak where I reconnect their colon. Some of those patients even die as a direct result of the fact that you did surgery on them. I think that being out in practice on my own now, I will feel a higher level of personal ownership of these complications than I did as a resident.
In any case, it is good to be done with formal training. It was really good to have 2 months of vacation between residency and starting work. However, I am itching to get started and am really hoping that I don't have a perineal evisceration (no, you don't want to know) as my first case like one of my colleagues did who started a month before me.
posted by The Mad Hatter at 5:14 PM
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