Surgery

Today is July 1. Actually, it’s July 2, but I was thinking about this yesterday and just couldn’t make time to write it down until today. So I’m going to say it’s July 1. Exactly ten years ago was July 1, 2016, and it was the last day of the life that I decided to leave behind – my last day of general surgery residency. But this note isn’t about July 1. (Then why did she just make such a big deal about it being July 1??) This is about 6 months before that July 1, which is when I actually decided to quit. ...

As some of you have heard, I recently resigned from surgical residency, and am leaving clinical medicine. Ten years ago, I decided to be a doctor. It was a decision that made perfect sense at the time: I wanted to help people who were suffering, and I was fortunate to have the ability and resources to gain entry into medical school. I wasn’t sure which specialty would be my calling, but shortly after starting my clinical rotations I fell in love with surgery. I loved seeing and evaluating patients who had a very clear and usually dramatic surgical problem that I knew could be solved by an operation, by putting hands on the patient and potentially curing them of whatever it was that was ailing them. ...