This past Monday I started Orthopaedic Surgery in Duluth. This rotation gives you almost no responsibilities, so it's much different than my peds rotation. On one hand this makes the rotation a lot more boring, but it's nice not to be working my butt off. In general I'll be spending most of my time on the surgery side, which is about 1/2 clnic and 1/2 surgery. I'll occasionally be on the med-ortho side, which is a clnic of Family Practice docs who did a sports med fellowship. They tend to do the medical management of patients, and refer to the surgeons when appropriate. Thus, from the surgery perspective, most of the non-surgical cases get weeded out. Very efficient for all parties involved.
So far I've only spent two days in surgery, saw 4 surgeries, scrubbed in on 3, and got to close on one. While I'm not thrilled to be doing orthopaedics, I find surgery to be really cool once scrubbed in. Just watching from a distance is boring, but getting to be close to the action is cool. This is definitely making me consider general surgery as a career choice.
I finished peds 2 weeks ago, but I was too lazy to update this. I liked the in-patient medical management side of things a lot, but was very bored during my 5 clinic days. While I enjoyed working with kids and parents, I'm not sure I would want to only work with kids and parents. So after finishing this rotation I'm again thinking that an Internal Medicine hospital-based sub-specialty might be a good choice for me, and that primary care is not for me.
The schedule on peds was a bit rough. Call was q4 (every 4th night), and on call nights I don't think I ever left before I had worked 30 hours. I usually would get 2-5 hours of sleep per call night. They also gave us a ton of autonomy. Depending on one's senior resident, one could function like a sub-i. I loved all the work and autonomy, and will really miss this rotation