this is a doozy...

So I had my final CPP yesterday. For those who remember, our CPP program is the one where we go shadow a doctor in the Champaign-Urbana community four times over the course of the year. The experience was good and really helped me find out some stuff about the kind of doctor I want to be. For instance, my doctor really doesn’t look anyone in the eye when he is talking to them, including patients. For me that’s a sign that he is not confident and I think that a doctor should be very confident especially when his advice/decisions will affect the patients’ lives, good or bad. I also learned to be more personable with patients than my doctor was. There were two older husband/wife teams that came in today in which it was the husbands who were having problems (both carpal tunnel problems, I believe) and it was obvious that they had been together for a long time and often would joke around with my doc and myself. But my doc is always about business and never really shares in the laugh with the patients. He would simply just start talking about the patient’s problem again as if his time was too valuable to take part in their petty jokes. I’m hoping that it is just him and that not all doctors seem to become more distant from their patients as time goes by. I can’t see myself practicing like that regardless of the type of medicine I go into. Now, don’t get me wrong, he is a great doctor and I would definitely want him operating on me if I was in need, but I’m just not a fan of how he goes about doing his business. He also just seems negative about most things and a lot of the things he tells me are things about how stupid he thinks the ED docs are or how someone didn’t do their job right because the x-rays from the ED weren’t at the perfect angle or basically anything about the ED in general. One time he told me about how he had to come in on Friday afternoon at like 5 to surgically repair a little girl’s broken wrist. He was complaining that he had to go in on a Friday and do a surgery that he wasn’t technically getting paid for because it was past his salaried hours or something like that. The whole time I was thinking that I would love to get the opportunity to go in and fix a little kid’s arm. Yea I know he’s older and been at it for a while, but still, I think it would be cool and really rewarding to do and I hope I never lose that feeling. However, I think that’s just him because he says that if he could have it his way he would do surgery all day every day and just do carpal tunnel releases. How incredibly boring. I spent a lot of yesterday thinking about how cool I thought his work was at first and now how boring I think the majority of it is. I had the chance to go into surgery with him yesterday but all he had was two trigger finger releases and two carpal tunnel releases. I opted out because in only three other visits with him, only 2 of which I went into surgery with him, I have seen like 5 or so carpal tunnel releases and 3 trigger finger releases and let me tell you, they don’t get any more exciting the more you see them. I could probably do a carpal tunnel release right now, that’s how easy they are. It got me thinking about what kind of practice I would like to have and what kind of procedures I want to do and how I want to treat patients. Now I know that there are always the basic procedures that you build a practice around, but I’m just hoping that there isn’t a day that I say, “I wish I could just do X surgery all day every day.”

Along those lines, I was reading an article in the New York Times recently about how doctors want to work less and have more time with their families than in the past (surprising, I know). It basically talked about a 3^rd generation doctor who, unlike her father and grandfather, decided to work in a hospital, have set hours, and have time for her family to be (she was pregnant - also something that wouldn’t happen in the past). Anyway her grandfather started his own one-man practice like 60 years ago in a small town where he did everything, but also made himself available whenever (basically permanently on call). Then his son came along and joined the practice and continued on the same lifestyle. His daughter (the pregnant doctor) told about how he would either never be home for dinner or if he was his beeper would go off and he would leave. She decided that wasn’t the route for her and decided to work in a hospital with other doctors so she could have time off. Surprisingly more and more doctors are going this route. Strange… It made me think, again, about the kind of practice I want to have. I mean my CPP doc is there 8-5 Monday-Friday and is on call one weekend a month, I believe. That’s pretty nice. I would really like to have something like that. However, I’ve heard that for ortho, it’s rarely the case. I guess we’ll see when I get to surgical rounds and can figure more stuff out. I just can’t imagine working all the time and never having time for my family and just time outside of the hospital in general. Medicine is scary. You go in young and eager to learn all you can. You’re constantly impressed by the simplest things. Then you go through the system and all of a sudden you’re a middle aged doctor who would love to have a carpal tunnel assembly line. How does that happen? I can’t imagine doing something like that. Or the majority of medicine nowadays, “Sir, you’re obese. Here’s your cholesterol meds, your blood pressure meds, etc. Now you need to start exercising and eating a healthy diet, okay?” That’s not the kind of medicine I’m signed up for.

On a completely unrelated note, I was in anatomy lab last night and we’re on superficial head and neck. I was working on a body with 2 other people and we were find nerves and whatnot on the face. Then we had to lift up the head a bit to look on the side/back part for a nerve. The skin of the scalp was no longer attached and basically pulled up in my hand and the cranium (top round part of the skull) fell off and landed on the table. It was pretty gross and the girl we were with had to step away for a minute. Pretty sure she was going to puke.  We were much more careful after that. 

welp, see ya later