Neurosurgery summary!
My two weeks of neurosurgery are over. Thoughts: It was my first surgical rotation, where I got a taste of the tortures of standing up for hours, sometimes scrubbed in, and after a 6 hour surgery, being rewarded with: holding down a piece of string while a resident makes ugly sutures. Thanks. When I get the sign that I passed my neurosurgery rotation I can write a little more dirt but until then, I think I should keep my lips sealed for a bit. LOL. Justtt in case. I’ll write my positives though:
WOW. Extremely exciting. I really loved the rotation, I got to see so much, learn the down low on residency, and the neurosurgeons (most of them) are really awesome. In a different life maybe I would want to be one of them. But you know I just cannot give up my right to sit, and eat when I want to, and to live on so little sleep for the rest of my life, and I don’t want to get yelled at for 7 years like I’m some dumb teenager. My self esteem is low enough thank you very much. I don’t need more people yelling at me telling me I’m a “re-taaard.” (They use the word liberally, with different ways of saying it and everything, a couple of times they put some weird accent on it.) Neurosurgery seems like a path that would be awesome for the first few years, but I could imagine the novelty wearing off, especially when you’re 40 or 50. Plus these guys they spend almost no time with their patients, and a lot of the time they don’t even seem to have much interest in the actual personality or life of the patient apart from the problem. If they do…. more for good gossip than care. Slithers of compassion are pretty rare in this specialty, and you treat them like precious pearls. It’s really so odd to me, their mult-faceted personalities. One minute, yelling at someone making them feel really dumb, the next minute laughing with them and making jokes, one minute giving genuine blunt advice (very good advice), and then gossiping about patients. Most of them are really nice people who have very scary sides to them. It’s a little hard to explain. Did I mention that they have hardly ANY patient contact??? It’s so crazy!! It’s as if they’re not even working with people, just problems.
