Musing on the future

I have a little time today to sit down and catch up on blogs because of a shortage of morning surgeries to attend. It's given me a chance to write about something that's been in the front of my mind lately.

I started my ob/gyn rotation 3 weeks ago and have been really enjoying the experience: I like the patients. I like that in obstetrics, there's the potential that people are coming to the hospital for a happy occasion. If you're working with cancer, that opportunity doesn't present itself. Noone is going around, passing out cigar's that say, "It's a Carcinoma!".
I like that there's a bit of surgery and a bit of medicine. You do all sorts of stuff, and there's a lot of fixable problems.

But...

There's always a downside, isn't there? I've found that unless you really are considering actually taking a course of action, you don't grapple with the consequences fully. I like ob/gyn enough that I'm considering doing it for the rest of my life. It's forced me to think seriously about the tradeoffs, and I'm not sure I can accept them.

For one thing, there's malpractice. All of the doctors I've spoken to have stated that this is a huge issue for them. In private practice, in order to cover the costs of their insurance, doctors are having to take on tons of patients. They all complain about how litigious this particular field is, and worst of all: They all say that the unpredictability of pregnancy makes this a nightmare. You never know who's going to have a bad outcome when they walk in the door. My own family had a near-tragedy in this regard. They did everything right and they still came so close to losing their child. You just can't tell sometimes. So it requires these huge costs, and hypervigilence with every person every time, and STILL... things get missed. Things show up. We all pray for the best, but in that 9 month window of pregnancy it sometimes seems to me like people just pull their fate out of a hat.

There's also the committment. This is the biggie. Ob/Gyn is not an exceptionally "lifestyle-friendly" choice. You're getting calls at all hours of the night. Many of them will require you to drop what you're doing and go to the hospital to for hours at a time.
I've seen people my father's age coming in at 6:45 on a Saturday and not being done until nearly 10. I see them making calls to their husbands and wives and telling them they're sorry they missed dinner, or that they'll have to take care of whatever they were doing on some other day. I can't help but feel like they're perpetually putting their life on hold for the sake of their profession, and it makes me wonder:
I do enjoy what I'm doing... a lot. But is there any profession that I will enjoy more than spending an evening with my family? Than sitting down and reading a book with my kids? Do I enjoy anything that much? And what if the nature of the profession necessitates me working harder and harder just to keep up with the cost of covering myself against all the "what if's"?

It's getting to the time where I need to start actively narrowing down choices for what I want to do when I grow up, and the more time I spend thinking about it, the more scary making any kind of definitive choice seems. I haven't written anything off yet, but "not saying no" is hardly like saying "maybe yes," is it?

I think that Ella is the only one who really has the right idea: Let's have us a nap and maybe later I'll have those strange people feed and pay attention to me.












-Riz