Medical Student Surgery Experience (Not Good).

What is life like for medical students on surgery rounds?   Most of the time, they are just there to be stepped on. The residents step on the medical students as a way of releasing the anger they experience from being abused by surgical attendings. My experience in the early 2000s during medical school was that surgery training was filled with a culture of anger. I don't know if that was just my institution or if that's what life in surgical training is like all over the country.  It's strange how you don't experience that in any other field of medicine. Our role as third year medical students was to  stay out of the way.  That's not to say that there aren't very nice surgeons. Just none that I worked with as a third year medical student. In fact some of the surgeons I work with as an attending are some of the nicest people I communicated with daily.

I remember one day I was in surgery on a 400 pound gentleman with an elective abdominal aortic aneurysm.  There were probably seven or eight people standing around the patient's wide open surgical site. I have no idea what they were looking at. To see anything one would have had to be standing right over the surgical site to see two feet down into the belly. My stool was not tall enough to see the inside of the abdominal cavity. I just stood there. I think for three or four hours. Doing nothing but occasionally holding onto a very large retractor.  That was my third year surgery training.  To stand and do nothing.  Yes folks, even medical training is inefficient at times.

Then something happened. I'm not sure what. I think a bead of sweat fell off my eyebrow. I think I may have wiped my brow with my shoulder. I don't even remember. At that point, some scrub tech started yelling at me. Telling me I contaminated the field with my shoulder to eye wipe. It's hard to contaminate a field when you aren't in the field to begin with.

This was half way through my rotation. A rotation filled with angry attendings yelling at angry surgical interns yelling at stressed out M3s. At that point I knew I had nothing to lose. I stepped off the stool. I backed up. Ripped my gown off and walked out. I knew at that point that I had no desire to work with people who felt obligated to yell at other people on a daily basis.  That's the day I walked into internal medicine and have loved it ever since.  Now I get to take care of people who are dead, but not really.