Tuesday . May 14 . 2002 . 10:12pm |
i wanna be sedated My anesthesiology resident looks just like my cousin. Especially when she has her surgical mask on. It's actually kind of distracting. Andy says that his resident kind of resembles him too, in that he's a little Jewish man with a name very similar to his own. I'm starting to wonder if they matched us up based on physical attributes. "Oh, the little Chinese medical student? Stick her with the little Chinese resident. They'll have tons to talk about!" I'm actually really glad that I got matched up with the resident that I did, since she's really nice and had been very good about showing me the ropes, letting me do stuff and so forth. Not to mention that she walked me through all the questions on the final exam, gave me frequent OR breaks throughout the day, and let me go home early to boot. Resident of the Year! Remember when I was talking before about how, stereotypically, certain personality types are drawn to certain fields of medicine? Like how jocks are supposed to become orthopods, armchair intellectuals are supposed to become neurologists, and bitter, angry women are supposed to become ob/gyns? Well, I'm still trying to figure out the personality types for the anesthesiologists. What kind of people become anesthesiologists, I wonder? I don't mean that to be smarmy or judgmental, so I hope it doesn't come off that way--it's just that a lot of what they do seems like it would be hard to take, for different reasons. The first thing that one thinks about the job of an anesthesiologist--or at least the first thing that I thought--was that they must be bored a lot of the time. And from what I've seen these past two days, that assumption is holding to be true. Sure, they're running around a lot at the beginning of the surgery, and they have stuff to do at the end, but for vast stretches in the middle, they have little else to do than watch monitors, write down numbers, and push a few syringes and twist errant knobs once in a while. This is a good thing, of course, since no one wants some anesthetic disaster wherein the anesthesiologist is trying frantically to keep the patient alive on the table--but a good thing can mean hours and hours of boredom. During one ENT case, I saw the anesthesiologist reading the latest issue of Garage and Shed magazine. I found this both funny and sad--first of all that there was such a magazine called Garage and Shed, and secondly, that this guy's job was so boring that he had to bring along supplemental reading material to keep himself occupied during the day. One anesthesiologist I met at a hospital up in Connecticut used to check her stock quotes during some longer surgeries. The second thing that strikes me about anesthesiology that's hard to take is the fact that the surgeons...well, they yell at you a lot. Now, anesthesiologists are MDs, just like the surgeons. They have four years of residency training. They do a lot of the work of keeping the patient alive, and for almost none of the glory. And yet a lot of surgeons treat them like they're techs. Crank the table up. What do you mean the patient's not induced yet, what's the hold up? I want you to keep her systolic pressure below 90, do you hear me? Do you hear me? It's annoying to watch, and you feel bad for the anesthesiologists when you see scenes like this unfold. When I asked her about it today, my resident told me, "Yeah, it can be annoying, but then I think about the fact that I get to sit down during the entire surgery, take breaks throughout, eat three meals a day, and go home before they do--and so in the end, I kind of just laugh. Of course, I guess that's kind of passive aggressive..." Hey, whatever gets you through the day. I guess in the end, anesthesiologists have good schedules, no patients to worry about when they get home, and make a ton of money. So if your outside life is important to you, anesthesiology is a great way to go. I'm just not sure that I could deal with all the rest of it. xo Michelle |
