Photo courtesy of Rachel

Today I was a cardio-thoracic surgeon… for like 5 minutes.

“Forceps to Rachel,” Dr. Al-Zahn tells the scrub tech. “OK, grab there,” he says, pointing with his forceps to the mostly dissected pericardium, “And now follow with me.”

I stick my forceps down into our patient’s chest cavity, which has been sawed at the sternum, and is being held open with a retractor-clamp contraption. A couple feet below my masked face, inches from my gloved hands, is the patient’s heart—drained of blood and “paralyzed” so this quadruple coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery can happen.

As I grab the tissue surrounding the aorta, Dr. Al-Zahn applies the Bovie (electrosurgical cautery) to the fatty areas. The fat sizzles away, allowing better exposure of the root of the aorta. He points, I grab, he melts the fat.

Point, grab, sizzle, melt. Point, grab, sizzle, melt. Fairly mundane, except for the part where I’m helping with OPEN HEART SURGERY!!!!

Before I know it, Dr. Keats, the other cardiothoracic surgeon, appears on my left, finished from changing out of his dirty gown into a sterile one. It’s my cue to exit.

Handing him my forceps, I’m sad to have to step aside, but obviously it makes waaay more sense for Dr. Keats to stand in my spot.

Sigh… Surgery is amazing. Surgery is awesome. I totally want to be a surgeon… except.

Except?

Except it’s just not that simple or easy of a decision.

The road to earning your MD is long. Four years of college, four years of med school, three to five years of residency, depending on the kind of doctor you want to be.

Surgery is like that road on steroids. Five years of residency, maybe one to two years of research (which you might need for your CV to be extra competitive for Plastic or Pediatric surgery), and another one to two years of fellowship. Worst-case scenario is 10 years of training after graduating medical school. Which I wouldn’t mind so much, except there’s all this other stuff I want to accomplish. Like getting married, having children, actually seeing my children grow up. You know, things normal people do when they don’t have to factor in spending every fourth night being up for 30+ hours in a hospital. Oh yes, and let’s not forget, the closer I get to 35, the less fresh my eggs get.

“You make your life and career what you want, regardless of the field,” say many of the mid-career doctors I’ve talked to. Could I really “have it all” with being a female surgeon? Since I’ve started to seriously consider surgery, I’ve been asking around. The answers are far from a straightforward yes.

On the one hand, I hear from my rotation director that the field is changing to accommodate women, “If you’re part of a large practice, you can work part time, take less call,” she reassures me. Great! Five points for surgery.

On the other hand, when talking to a Pediatric surgeon’s daughter, I find out he worked so much, she didn’t really know him until she was about five years old…Hmm, not exactly the kind of parent I was hoping to be??

Then of course, there’s what you witness with just being on the Surgery rotation. Like a few weeks ago, one Vascular surgeon’s wife called him almost every three hours over the 16-hour period I spent with him. “Dr. Charles, it’s your wife, she was wondering why you didn’t come home last night…Dr. Charles, your wife wants to know when you’ll be home…Dr. Charles, your wife said you said that six hours ago.” Dr. Charles returned to his wife around 9:45 pm that night after essentially being up and operating for nearly 40 hours… Definitely not the kind of lifestyle I want…Minus 10 points for surgery?

Even my friends who are already surgical residents only tepidly encourage me to sign up. “If there’s anything else you like besides surgery, do that instead, because this shit is HARD,” advised my friend Isabel, a third year surgical resident.

Funny, that’s the general message I got about pursuing a career as a doctor. Guess it’s an ominous sign that I’m nearly three quarters done with med school? Or that I pause when considering whether I love sunlight more than the windowless OR?

Sometimes I wonder if this is karma’s payback for being a difficult child that I can only picture myself going into one of the more torturous specialties. Why can’t less draining specialties make me as excited? Like pediatrics!

Being a surgeon would be totally badass. But is it worth all the bad that seems to come along with it? I’m still trying to decide…No big deal. It’s only, you know, the rest of my life.

So if anyone’s got any suggestions….

ODDS CHECK:

• The odds an employed person 16 or older is a surgeon are 1 in 2,872.
• The odds a med school graduate will apply to a residency program in General Surgery are 1 in 6.37. For Integrated Thoracic Surgery programs, the odds are 1 in 548.9.

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