MLK Day Fun

My name is Derrick Antoniak, and this is my blog about medical school.

So part of medical school is figuring out what you want to do when you graduate medical school. Unfortunately, in the third year, you only get to rotate through six specialties: family medicine, pediatrics, general surgery, internal medicine, psychiatry, and OB/GYN. By the end of the third year, you pretty much have to have made up your mind so that you can schedule the correct rotations early in the 4th year and get letters of recommendation in time to turn in with your residency application. So if your interests lie outside one of those six specialties, you have to spend significant time in the first two years exploring other specialties on your own time.

Today I took advantage of the holiday and spent the morning shadowing a neurosurgeon in town, and it was quite amazing. His first procedure was scheduled for 7 AM, "cranial vault reconstruction for severe multisuture craniosynostosis", you know, that old chestnut. An adult head is a pretty small area in which to operate, but this procedure was done on a 2-month-old, and she was TINY! When the surgeon's hand is the size of the patient's entire upper body, it's tough to imagine being able to do reconstructive surgery on the head, but, despite my concerns, the first cut was made by 8, the biggest piece of the skull had been carefully dissected away from the brain and removed by 8:45, and by 9:30 the reconstructed skull had been screwed back in place and the scalp closed back over it.

It seems like a strange job. Get to work real early, make sure the patient is ready for surgery, go to the staff lounge and have coffee and relax until the OR calls and says they are ready (which will not happen until the patient is actually under anasthesia), open someone's head and fix some problem (anything from cancer to congenital malformations to bleeding from trauma), close the person's head, leave to see the next patient (without waiting to see the miracle of the first patient actually waking up after you cut open their skull), back to the staff lounge to wait for the OR to call, etc, etc.