Obs, Gyne

Let's see, what have I done in the last 4 weeks. I've scrubbed in on several c-sections, a hysterectomy, a few prolapse repairs (read we made sure a woman's uterus or bladder wasn't coming out of her vagina anymore), I've delivered a baby myself, and I've been called wonderful by one of my patients. I got to hold someone's uterus in my hands, I've felt blood pouring over my gloves (it's weird how warm it really feels), I've held a baby as it takes its first breaths.

Obstetrics and gynecology may not be a career choice for me, but it is a fun specialty. There's oncology, surgery, medicine, and you get to follow women throughout their pregnancies and deliver their babies. It's interesting, but there's other areas of medicine that also interest me. I suppose that's why I like family medicine so much, it means that I can do it all except scrub in on surgeries. I mean, if they had some kind of magical specialty where you could be a surgeon and family doctor, that would be cool, but the training would be forever and you'd never, ever, be proficient enough at anything at all.

So, maybe I'll do some deliveries as a family physician. Maybe I won't. At this point in time, I can definitely see why people go into obstetrics and gynecology as a specialty. It isn't just STDs and looking at vaginas all day long. That is part of it, and yes, I am getting a skewed view of what this specialty is, but it's not as bad as I thought it would be.

I still get more excited about family medicine than anything else. Anesthesia is in the back of my mind still and I'm planning on doing an elective in it to either get it out of my system or determine if that's what I want to do for the rest of my life. Either way, that will be a fun rotation. I still think that I want to do family the most.

I'll admit that I've been very lucky in terms of staff and residents. Everyone since day 1 has been wonderful, even during my pediatrics rotation. It's easy to get lost in the scut work that we all have to do: follow up on labs, fill out consults, paperwork paperwork paperwork; but really, if people can't see past that, they really don't know what they're missing. I think this is the best job in the world and honestly, I can't imagine doing anything else.

Every day, I fall in love with what I do more and more.