Surgery is not a spectator sport

Gosh, I have so much to write that I must think at least 10x a day, "Oh, I wish I could blog about that right now." But of course, nobody ever accused your third year of medical school of being boring and full of free time to blog. So I will have to satisfy myself with just one right now. I've been itching to write about my inpatient surgery rotation. I just finished two weeks on the colorectal surgery service. And -- it was fun! Actually fun! But -- I am exhausted! So exhausted!

I had the most incredible resident, Em, who gave me more responsibility and taught me more in two weeks than a textbook could have taught me in a year. She took me to lunch and had me practice my subcuticular stitches on a Starbucks banana. She stayed hours after she had to just to talk about patients and illnesses. She gave me rides to grand rounds. She let me do things in surgery and stepped out of the way. In short, she was amazing.

She understood that surgery is not a spectator sport. That once you are familiar with the excitement of being in the OR, it is supremely boring to stand at the back of the room and watch other people operate in a field you can't see, when they are speaking behind masks and it's difficult to decipher what they are saying. Knowing this, Em encouraged me to get my hands dirty. I got to see beautiful dissections of organs. I got to check a colon segment (removed) for cancer. I got to hold countless instruments for delicate procedures. I got to see the abdominal aorta pulsing and the shining dark brown lobes of the liver. How many people have held a pancreas? I am so lucky. Em advocated for me to the surgeons, getting them to let me scrub in, teaching me skills, and essentially pushing me to learn more about what it means to become a surgeon. It's tough. You wake up at 4:45 am if you are a resident. You rarely go to sleep before midnight. You do the math. But there they are, tireless and dedicated and liking their work, every day.

I don't know how I will ever thank her, but I know that when I am an intern (a first year doc post-MD), I will be kind to my medical students because of her. She made me think that you don't have to be a jerk to be a surgeon (and so did the rest of the team, who was pretty nice, in fact).

Oops, out of time. Drat.