spring "break"

I said it at the beginning of med school: I don't know for sure what I want to do (I was pretty sure I wanted to be a surgeon, but hey, some people decide they love pediatrics when they thought they hated children... things change), but I was going to base my choice on what I liked the best. Not what someone else thought was the best choice, or where I thought I'd have the best lifestyle or make the most money or have the shortest, easiest training (though some days, this is tempting).

So in that way, my spring break has been affirming, on several fronts. I chose to spend my two-week spring break rotating on ENT (long story, but I'm going to Peru in May and I needed credit for those two weeks. Plus I got the chance to meet the faculty and see what it's all about prior to scheduling for 4th year next week. Win-win?). ENT is a field that has intrigued me since anatomy during med 1, but I hadn't gotten the chance to rotate through it yet. I showed up with my guns loaded, ready to do my best to impress. And I also learned a lot. A) ENTs work hard. And I mean HARD. Especially on the Head & Neck service, where it's not uncommon for days to last from 5:30am until well after midnight. 2) I got a glimpse into the amazing breadth that the field offers; highly varied, highly intellectual (these may be the smartest doctors I've worked with. Do I fit in here?), and highly rewarding. And D) this is what I want to do with my career. This is a field in which I'll find endless intellectual stimulation, it's highly technical in its surgical aspects, but it's got more clinic time than a general surgery practice. Some patients follow up with their ENTs for years as they manage them post-cancer treatment, or follow chronic conditions like Meniere's disease or Neurofibromatosis Type II. It's like the best of both worlds: the performance aspect of surgery with the human aspect of long-term patient-doctor relationships. There are so many niches within the field that I think I could be happy in; I've got lots of good choices here. And, maybe most importantly, the people in the field that I've interacted with are still happy with their choice of career, whether they're in their first year of training or have been in practice for years. Nothing is more disappointing as a med student than having a doctor tell you "whatver you do, don't do what I did." That attitude was nowhere to be seen in these two weeks.

Yes, the residency is 5 years long and is highly demanding (as is getting into a residency in the first place). But as one of my attendings told me last week: don't let something that's going to be hard during the next five years of your life dictate what you choose to do with the next fifty. So for now, I'll learn as much as I can, work as hard as I can, and yes, I'll keep my guns ready.