Neurosurgery experiences

I have now finished my neurosurgery rotation. Let me premise this by saying the one thing I know I don’t want to do in medicine is surgery. However, we’re required to do 8 weeks of surgery in 6th year, so I don’t have a choice. You gotta do what you gotta do. That being said, I enjoyed the neurosurgery rotation as much as I could have. If you decide to do a neurosurgery rotation here, I’ll give some advice. First, know that you have to show up at 6 am. This part you get used to quite fast. Obviously, as a medical student you’re not going to get to really get in on the surgeries seeing as how they’re so precise and difficult, understandably so. But what you can do that they’ll appreciate is helping out the scrub nurses. Wipe off the body pads, bring in the bed, make sure you enter the OR room when the patient enters and help roll the patient to either recovery or NICU, put the pins in the Mayfield and add the bacitracin ointment. You can scrub in, just ask ahead of time, and then you can assist and see more. The spinal surgeries are practically impossible to see anything just because it’s so deep and a small hole, so either skip those ones or scrub in. If you want to be a neurosurgeon, I highly recommend doing this rotation because the residents are very knowledgable and they have a good program. They are willing to teach you if you show genuine interest.

During this month, my roommate Orsi and I took a short trip to Toronto. You can take a Greyhound bus there for about ~$30 roundtrip and it takes about 3.5 hours one way. Orsi and I have this running joke that we attract bad luck when traveling. It could be true, but I think traveling in the Northeastern part of the US in the dead of winter is bad luck in general. We went to CN tower, a tall building in Toronto that allows you to overlook the city and is a major tourist attraction… but we were there on a day where it was snowing and so NOTHING, and I mean NOTHING, was visible. I’ll attach a photo. It literally looks like we’re standing in front of a white wall. But what can ya do? At least we can say we tried. We went to the distillery district, which I’d highly recommend, and a cool sports bar which was a great place to watch the hockey game at on a Saturday night. Not everything worked out as smoothly as planned/hoped on that trip, but I still had a great time because Orsi and I are able to laugh at every single thing, no matter how annoying. Having a good travel buddy is key!

I am now almost finished with my first week of my last rotation here, which is internal medicine-melanoma, sarcoma and thoracic. I wish I could say I’m one of those people who’s always known exactly which kind of doctor they’d like to be, but I’m not. I honestly feel like I could do multiple things, but haven’t had the opportunity to spend enough time getting to know the specialty and not one thing has truly stood out to me. I’m currently thinking of pathology as the main contender, know that I really enjoy gynecology but am only ehhhh when it comes to obstetrics, and I don’t see a point in doing only gyno when you could do both and be more marketable. But I am enjoying oncology and am considering thinking about doing medical oncology. We’ll see if this rotation convinces me!

CN Tower view:)

16 February 2018

Stephanie Zority