Like a Babe in Arms

I am in the middle of my second to last week of third year. This is absolutely monumental.

I'm in anesthesia this week - it is just a brief, one week rotation. And it is supremely cool! There are all these gadgets and levers and knobs. And the residents are fantastic. A complete change from the OB residents (but they would even be cool without the comparison to OB). I worked with one first year resident who grew up in the Midwest (like me), then moved to the Northwest (like me), went back to the Midwest for med school (kind of like me - I went back for college) and then came here (like me!) And, she is blonde, like me. It was like meeting another version of myself!

So, in the Future of Brenna, Anesthesiology is officially added to my top three career choices (not just because of the residents - it is just dang cool stuff). My top three, again, in case you haven't been paying attention: Pediatrics, Neurology, Anesthesiology.

Pediatrics, Neurology and Anesthesiology are about as different from one another as you can get. Why am I drawn to all three of them? My theory: if you take the first letter of each specialty (P, N, A) and rearrange them, you can spell both "PAN" and "NAP" bringing to mind images of spending all day eating and sleeping - quite possibly the perfect life. (And a life that we all lived until we were about 9-12 months old... ahh, the good old days...)

It is presumably possible to combine all three - to be a pediatric neuroanesthetist. But that abbreviation would be "PNA" which, for you non-med speaking people out there, is the abbreviation for "pneumonia" - most definitely not a perfect life. Besides, I don't think the demand for pediatric neuroanesthetists is very large.

Fortunately, anesthesia is freaking hard to get into nowadays (No call and no clinic - can anyone say 'lifestyle?') Fourteenpeople from the class above us are going into anesthesia. That's over a sixth of the class! But that class is populated with impersonable gunners, the type of person currently flooding the anesthesia market. I am not a gunner, and have valued sanity and quality of life, and as a result, do not have the numbers one needs to become an anesthesiologist.

That's okay, because I hadn't really changed my mind from peds anyway!