A Journey of a Thousand Miles...

usually starts with a flat tire and a broken fan belt.

Well it's official. We just had our orientation for our R2 year of neurosurgery. Amongst all the other info we received today, we got our business cards, loupes (those fancy OR glasses with telescopes in the lenses), call schedule, team assignments, and a whole lot of "good luck, you're going to need it."

This year was the reason for which this blog was created. It's purportedly the hardest year of residency we could ever imagine. Listening to the instructions from our attendings in regards to the "back up" we'll have during our first few weeks on call made it sound like we were preparing for war or some great natural disaster. The way the more experienced nurses are heading off to vacation and how the attending surgeons have ceased operating silently reaffirms the huge white elephant in the room: new interns, new R2s - don't get sick, because all around the US during the month of July in academic institutions people die. It's a well known fact that everyone gets promoted during this time. The residents that only months earlier were marching to the beat of a seasoned chief resident now are asked to call their own cadence. The residents who only days before, separated by a week of debauchery and drunkeness, were mindless work horses known as interns, are now expected to make clinical decisions and perform surgery - albeit under close supervision. And the medical students who only weeks before were still strictly book learned and green, are now scrambling around the hospital with their heads cut off like chickens, but still trusted and referred to as "doctor." Yea, now's not the time to be ill.

That being said, if you do find yourself in the hospital at this time, be assured that everyone is hypervigilant. Everyone's work will be checked, rechecked, and checked once more over as no one exactly trusts anyone to do their job completely right. They say that Christmas is a bad time to be in the hospital as that's when residents get overconfident and too big for their britches, making decisions they can't support or correct when things go wrong. So that elective surgery you were thinking about? Yea, I'd shoot for sometime in October.

But I digress. Back to neurosurgery. 337 days, 48 weeks, 116 overnight calls, 200 operative cases, and one soul to preserve throughout the whole ordeal. It's exciting, but let's face it, it's scary. Although all medicine/surgery has its risks, neurosurgery is one of those fields where if you get lazy, sloppy, or lose focus for even a second, someone could die. Perhaps a little melodramatic, but unfortunately true. But hey, it keeps things interesting.