my husband's job--Pt. I

of my favorite topics to whine and bitch about is my husband's job. my husband is a surgery resident. i think a lot of people don't understand the whole residency/doctor thing--they leave this all sort of sketchy on shows like E/R. In the last year of medical school (4 years long) you have to decide what kind of doctor you would like to be and you apply to residency programs for the speciality you have chosen. some specialities are much more competitive than others and the length of training is different for each. for example family practice is not very competitive and the residency is three years long. Orthopediatic surgery is VERY competitive and is 5 to 6 years. mixed in to all this is how much you make at the end. orthos make anywhere from 2 to 3 (or more) times more than family docs. ALL (at least 90%) of doctors bitch about how much money they make.

my husband chose surgery. surgery has typically been competitive but was fluctuating recently because a lot of people were turned off by lifestyle (when you hear doctors talk about lifestyle it means how many hours they will end up working and how much call they would have to take) and how reimbursements for general surgeons has been going down. we knew we didn't want to move and if we had to move we didn't want to go far so he applied to places in the midwest. at the end of interviewing you make a list ranking what programs you would like go to and the schools make a list of who of the people in they interviewed they want--both interviewee and schools rank their choices. On about March 19th there is a day called Match Day in which all medical students in the country are given an envelope letting them know where they are going. they really do not know it all depends on how they ranked various places and how and if those places ranked them. if they isn't a match (and sometimes this happens) then the student has to 'scramble'-which is exactly like it sounds. people from his medical school will call around to various programs and ask if they have room for one more and beg them to let the scrambling student have it. (sounds a bit like duck duck goose to me)

luckily my husband got in the program where we already lived so we didn't have to move. his program is 5 years long. most surgery programs are this long but some are 6 or 7 years. they are longer if you have to work in a lab for a year. the year my husband started the new rules for residency work hours came into effect. before there was no rules about how many hours programs could make their residents work. now programs are supposed to not have their residents work more than an average of 80 hours a week. before residents would work Q2 call or they were on call every other night. i think a lot of people also don't know what 'being on-call' means. when i resident is on-call they go into work and stay all day and all night and into the next day. before the rules residents would go in at 5 or 6am in the morning and not be let go until 5 or 6pm the following day. they would work 36 hours and come home and do it again. now they have 'post-call privileges'. this means that if you have been on call they are supposed to let you at noon instead of keeping you all the next day. generous, no?

I HATE call.