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February 13, 2007
why i am not a surgeon, by maggie
so....as my reader may recall, during my 3rd year of medical school i thought to myself that i may want to be a surgeon when i grow up, surgery is cool, you get immediate results, and people realize what you do and appreciate it. however, besides realizing how fucking cool anesthesia is (a main reason for me choosing anesthesia over surgery) i hate that surgeons are often assholes who yell and shit, and who are difficult to get along with.
all that being said, i think that it is obvious where this post is going, especially knowing that this month i am doing a general surgical rotation.
i am working with a chief resident who i did not know terribly well prior to this rotation, but i had spoken with him several times in the past, and he seemed like a neat guy. you can imagine how i was surprised when in the first few days of the month (when my chief was out of town) numerous people told me he was a lazy little shit.
this brings me to....the first 6 hours of my rotation i had a senior resident, but he was post call, and was going to go out of town for two days after, so after he left at noon on thursday he was gone until sunday, and my chief was out of town for the first three days. SO, for the first nearly 3 days of the month i, an anesthesia intern, was the entire surgical team.
moving on, i have come to find that my chief shows up to rounds AT THE EARLIEST 30-45 minutes late, more commonly, 45-60 minutes late. he is also the first to leave at the end of the day, and offers excuses throughout the day about why he hasn't, doesn't or won't do various things.
i was off this past weekend, and when i returned monday morning i got a phone call from a nurse regarding a patient who had had an operation several days previously and was still on a dilaudid pca (read, strong narcotic by vein that is administered in small doses when a button is pressed), and she had her nurse call to see if she could get MORE IV pain medicine. since my senior resident (this is a different one than i mentioned from the first day, that is another story, lukily this guy is nice and a hard worker from what i can tell) and chief were standing right there, i asked if we were still giving her IV meds in addition to her pca (this is the first time i have ever heard of this being done, and essentially misses the point of the pca, and i disagree with it personally as well, i came upon intelligence that this patient abuses narcotics--i suspected it from the beginning, but ran into a medicine colleague who took care of her on 2 admissions in december, she sent the patient home after the first admission with 30 days worth of long acting morphine pills and percocet pills, and when she came back 10 days later, she said they were all gone--ANYWAY, this is highly unusual). after telling the nurse that i would put in an order for more pain medicine i asked my cheif/senior-->I WILL FINISH THIS ENTRY LATER 8), wait with bated breath
Posted by Maggie at 6:12 PM | Comments (1)