June 30

The day before the first day of surgery internship at Chicago University Hospital, I went in to meet with the Vascular Surgery intern whose place I would be taking the following day.  She was a plump, tired looking woman with stringy blond hair.  She was at the nursing station on the vasc surg floor, working.  She had been working overnight until 1 am that am, and had returned to work maybe 5 hours later.  She related to me the basics of running the service, and who my supervising residents would be.  I reviewed the charts of the patients I would be picking up and made a list of them, their problems, and their meds.  Then I went home, vaguely terrified, yet elated at the prospect of beginning my internship.

I was luckier than my predecessor on the vasc surg service, in that I shared the service with another intern, making it more likely I would actually get some decent sleep on the nights I was not on call.  

First post: Forward/med school

I write this as a memoir of my journey through a surgical residency.  I am finished now, and have been in practice for several years.  I have always wanted to record my story: this is a good forum. 

The timeline for this narrative is irrelevant: suffice it to say these events occurred some time during the 1990s.

All of the events and people herein are real. I have altered the locations and names to obscure the true identities of where and with whom I worked.  I also endeavor to be as objective as possible, realizing that I will not be able to avoid injecting my own personal bias into these events: at the same time, these events did happen to me, and no one else experienced my perspective of these events.  

I had a great time in med school, and was encouraged to apply for a very competitive residency: neurosurgery.  I did run into one detractor, however.  The residency program director at my med school once told me: "you will never get into a neurosurgery residency, because you are female."  My gender had never been an issue before in med school.  At that time,  a shift was occurring in the makeup of the med school class.  Each incoming class had a slightly higher percentage of women than the previous one, and my class was almost 50% women.  I never felt, nor did I feel other women med students were, subject to differential treatment.  

Once I was in residency, in general it never occurred to me that I would be treated differently due to my gender, although in retrospect this may have occurred.  It certainly was not something that was even on my radar at the time, and I will try not to attribute events that occurred during my residency to gender discrimination, although, for some events, this may have been the case. 

The purpose of this blog is to record and share my experiences during my residency. Every word is true, and you can take whatever lesson or message you chose to about the nature of surgical residency training.