or when you're not paying attention.
or both.
the year was 2007. fresh from passing the board exams (barely, if i may say so), i was pondering my career options. which specialization was i to take? there are a few number of choices.
one was surgery. i always loved surgery. back in medical clerkship and internship i always loved it when i get to scrub in. sure, back in clerkship all we ever had to do was to retract and expose the operating field (a painstaking task, especially if you had to keep the operating field exposed for 5 hours straight). but back in internship i was able to perform minor operations in the outpatient department and even had the opportunity to perform a few uncomplicated surgeries from cutting to closing. i enjoyed it. it is a very exciting field. the drawback is that it is a very stressful specialty. long hours in the operating room, on-call status, long work hours. for someone with a medical history such as myself, i don't think i would survive 5 years of surgery residency. too bad.
January 2007 during the Surgical Missionanother option was pediatrics. i loved being around children. i like playing with them, goofing around with my little patients even if it means making a fool out of myself. and kids seem to gravitate towards me, i don't know why. i guess they think i'm a kid too, although much bigger than they are. my little patients seem at ease with me. i can even make a baby stop crying when his/her mother fails to do so. it's a great joy, being around kids. i feel younger when i'm with my little patients. but sadly, when your patients are little kids and you tend to be sickly, you really can't hang with them too much. i'd make their conditions worse rather than make them better. again, too bad.
early morning at the nurseryone other option was radiology. it has always interested me, radiology. to diagnose a patient's condition using imaging techniques, that's just fascinating! a simple x-ray study can give you so much information on what you're dealing with. plus, the workload is not so much like in the other specialties. with the advancements in technology, radiology has become a very appealing field especially now that everything can be converted into a digital format and you can view the images anywhere, be it at the hospital, in the coffee shop or even at home. very, very appealing. plus, it's very challenging. so i ended up in radiology.
i applied to different hospitals after researching which has good training programs. i was fortunate enough to have been accepted into one of the best. but once i started residency, i realized how not so benign radiology can be. sure, you interpret imaging studies. but to do that for the entire day even until the unholy hours during duty nights is very tiring. i often get migraines from staring at the bright lights of the negatoscope (view box) or from looking at images on the computer monitors. and the imaging studies just keep on coming and coming. that's the drawback of getting into one of the busiest hospitals in the metro. and when you do get some time off to catch a few z's, you'll hear a knock on the door and waiting on the other side is an intern or a fellow resident who's requesting you to do an initial read of an x-ray film (if you're lucky) or a ct scan or mri study. to miss a crucial finding is a big no-no. you wouldn't want the emergency department to send home a patient because you said the study was normal only to realize hours after that the patient has a fracture only very subtly seen in the x-ray and you missed it because you were half asleep when you were looking at his/her film hours before. and i never knew there were so many books to read. each organ system has their own reference, and each modality has their own book as well. i spent more on books now compared to med school.
although it was unexpectedly tough, it was also fun. i am very fortunate to have co-residents that are good-natured, fun to be with, and who do not care about the hierarchy of residents. and the consultants are all very nice. they even take the time to teach.
time flies fast. one minute i was just starting residency, and now i'm almost done with my 3rd year. and wouldn't you know it, i was appointed as chief resident for next year. there are two of us actually. but still, chief resident. i never wanted nor dreamed of it. if there was a way to, i wouldn't be chief next year. but i guess things happen for a reason. of course being made chief is a huge honor, but it comes with a very big responsibility. i do hope i can live up to the expectations.
so here's to 2011. it's going to be one heck of a year, that i'm sure.
i applied to different hospitals after researching which has good training programs. i was fortunate enough to have been accepted into one of the best. but once i started residency, i realized how not so benign radiology can be. sure, you interpret imaging studies. but to do that for the entire day even until the unholy hours during duty nights is very tiring. i often get migraines from staring at the bright lights of the negatoscope (view box) or from looking at images on the computer monitors. and the imaging studies just keep on coming and coming. that's the drawback of getting into one of the busiest hospitals in the metro. and when you do get some time off to catch a few z's, you'll hear a knock on the door and waiting on the other side is an intern or a fellow resident who's requesting you to do an initial read of an x-ray film (if you're lucky) or a ct scan or mri study. to miss a crucial finding is a big no-no. you wouldn't want the emergency department to send home a patient because you said the study was normal only to realize hours after that the patient has a fracture only very subtly seen in the x-ray and you missed it because you were half asleep when you were looking at his/her film hours before. and i never knew there were so many books to read. each organ system has their own reference, and each modality has their own book as well. i spent more on books now compared to med school.
although it was unexpectedly tough, it was also fun. i am very fortunate to have co-residents that are good-natured, fun to be with, and who do not care about the hierarchy of residents. and the consultants are all very nice. they even take the time to teach.
time flies fast. one minute i was just starting residency, and now i'm almost done with my 3rd year. and wouldn't you know it, i was appointed as chief resident for next year. there are two of us actually. but still, chief resident. i never wanted nor dreamed of it. if there was a way to, i wouldn't be chief next year. but i guess things happen for a reason. of course being made chief is a huge honor, but it comes with a very big responsibility. i do hope i can live up to the expectations.
so here's to 2011. it's going to be one heck of a year, that i'm sure.
No comments:
Post a Comment