2 more days till San Francisco!

Things are looking up =) This most recent elective was lots of fun and went pretty well. I wish I had chosen to do it earlier so I could wrangle a reference letter or two out of it. CaRMS applications are finito! Put the final touches on it two nights ago and the rest is not up to me! Did a good chunk of work on a paper that's been dragging itself on and on but is now that much closer to completion. And now I get to go to a nice, relatively warm place with my favorite boy and eat many tasty things and go shopping!

Brain -> off until January

Bored, bored, bored. People say that fourth year is so much easier, you have so much more extra time than you used to, things are so slack. Which is true. But sometimes it's just too much of a good thing. This week, we are finished on average by noon. Then we hang around the hospital until 4:00 pm, just in case something comes up. So you take a long lunch, you check your email, maybe you read a bit, you take coffee and on and on and on. Meanwhile, you could be at home working on the paper that was supposed to be finished in September. You could be working out because on average, you work out once a month. You could even cook dinner, because your younger sibling very kindly took over all domestic chores when you got into third year. But no, you're stuck here. Worst part is, I'm doing an elective in a field I'm interested in and will be applying to and this elective is sucking my will to live.

A written assignment we were required to do as part of our sub-specialty surgery rotation ensues. Cheesy, as forced reflection often is, but it evolved into more than I thought it'd be when I started"

Throughout my surgical rotation, I encountered a number of different attitudes towards women in surgery. For the most part, despite the fact that I would introduce myself as a medical student, patients tended to assume I was a nurse. And while I don’t take any offence at being mistaken for a nurse, the cultural stereotypes regarding the role of females in medicine are pervasive and have never been as apparent to me as they were on this rotation. Once they realized I was part of the medical team, many patients would make comments to the effect of “that’s good, we need more females in surgery” but on occasion, one or two patients made comments like “but don’t you want to have a family?“ or commented on how difficult life would be once I had a family.

Attitudes from other healthcare staff, surgical assists and preceptors also varied. Most treated me the same as they would any other student. One person asked me what specialty I wanted to go into and when I said Pediatrics, told me he thought that was a “good option for a woman because Cardiac Surgery [is] too demanding”. Another person said it was a good option if I wanted to have children. A preceptor said that as a female I was well suited for Pediatrics because my personality was gentler; he never actually said who I was gentler than.

I didn’t take offence at these comments because I realize they were made with my best interests in mind. However, implicit are stereotypes about the differences between male and female personalities, stereotypes about the time demands of surgical specialties, the assumption that because I’m a woman I want to have children, and implications that availability is one of the main factors that determines whether or not one is a ‘good’ parent. These comments led me to examine my own stereotypes and assumptions towards my own gender and my own profession. Yes, I would like to do Pediatrics, but how much of that stems from a genuine interest and how much of that stems from wanting to come home every night to cook and eat dinner with my family. Why do I want to cook dinner for my family so much? Where did I get this idea that this is what ‘good’ mothers do? Yes, I do want to be a ‘good’ parent and yes, I want to ‘be there’ for my children, but to what extent has that desire been influenced by TV shows that feature cheerful, nuclear families sitting around the dinner table together eating a home-cooked meal. And why do people, myself included, assume that a career in surgery would automatically obviate these things?

This rotation, while it didn’t cause me to change any of my personal or professional goals, led me to reflect on why I have chosen these particular goals and my motivations behind them, the extent to which those motivations are governed by personal desires and again, the extent to which those desires are further governed by cultural ideas. I haven’t answered these questions yet. Like everyone, doctors function within a society and rightly or wrongly, assume many of that society’s beliefs. I have yet to tangle out how much of what I’ve chosen to believe really stems from me.

Labels: Professional BS

As one of my favorite bloggers puts it, here are some "random bullets of crap"

• My new guilty pleasure is Indian fast food. We live upstairs from this take-out place and their sample platter gives you a PILE of rice, potatoes or lentils, and 4 different curries. I stink like garlic and I'm in heaven.
  
• American Gangster - saw it last night, absolutely loved it.
  
• Yay! Mandarin orange season has begun.
• I think I enjoy shopping on my own more so than with other people. That being said, I would've appreciated a second opinion on the sweater I bought today.
  
• I don't see what the big deal with baths is. It wastes a ton of water, it takes a lot of time, the water's either so hot I start getting light-headed, or it cools so quickly I want to get out after 15 minutes, and any time you use bubble bath or a bath bomb I end up wanting to shower afterwards to rinse all the bits off.
• My favorite sushi place in Edmonton was decidedly sub-par on Friday night and I'm sad. I can't decide if it deserves a second chance or if that will make me look desperate, but I don't want to go looking for a new sushi place. We need better food here.
• Only 5 more days of surgery. I'm overjoyed. I hate having to study when I have little personal interest in a subject. That being said, I can't deny that it isn't important to reluctantly, I slog through.
• I want to change my blog template, but I don't want to change all the little custom features I have going.
  

Labels: "Random bullets of crap"

OK I'm back. For a while, blogging was starting to feel like a chore and really not very much fun. But life has settled a little bit and a season of change will be coming around soon so it feels right to start writing again. I spoke tonight with a friend about the beauty of a blank journal. I love touching beautiful books. I can never bring myself to write in a beautiful book. It seems like there's nothing I can say that could be profound enough to mar the pages of such a book. Besides, when you stop journaling in such a book, like the blog hiatus, it feels like a failure. But a blog allows you to get your thoughts out aloud without the permanence of something like a journal. If you don't like what you've written, go back and edit the post. If the blog ceases to fulfill its purpose, just hit delete and it vanishes into cyberspace. The ugliness, pettiness, sheer superficiality of your thoughts is impermanent.

CaRMS has descended upon us. I can't have a conversation with anyone these days without it coming up. My portion of the application is over and done. Now it's just waiting, waiting, waiting.