Oh look!

the best part about overnight call is the day off afterward to play.

psychiatry

I have so many great stories from this rotation, but none of them can i post on the internets. I can merely bore you with my own meandering thoughts.

My grade 8 teacher (whom i despised at the time) had some pretty good pedagogy in retrospect. (Even if she got it very backwards when she told me that my best friend was a bad influence on me). She taught us how to make decisions by listing columns of plus, minus, and interesting consequences to potential choices. Psychiatry is the first specialty rotation that i have really thought might be an option. and I'm starting to feel a bit of pressure to make a decision already as to where i want to go with this whole medicine thing. I'm also open to advice.

Plus:

* It's a lot like camp
* I know stuff already: i.e. for the first time in medical school, my past life counts for something.
* The day starts at 9ish and ends by 5
* really good stories

Minus:

if someone yells "is there a doctor in the house?!?" they wouldn't really mean me.
I learned all that anatomy. And for what?
I'm having dreams about psychotropic medications again already, and it's only been 6 weeks.

Interesting:

* From my (non-representative) vantage point, this rotation made psych look like the gay-est job outside of queer community organizing. weird.
* I had no idea how many people have delusions about gay-ness, turning gay, being targeted by gays etc.
* I found it kind of tender and elegant that all these gay-fearing folk were heard, comforted and re-educated by a roomfull of queers, dykes, queens, twinks and fags.

life's funny.

People tend to be drawn to fields where they have had important/emotional experiences. Like the woman with diabetes who works in endocrinology, or the person with crohn's disease who is looking at a GI fellowship, my experiences with illness and disease have overwhelmingly been psychiatric. (blah blah blah sublimation blah blah)

Easily, it is the residency that i would enjoy the most. But i worry that i wouldn't love it for the rest of my life... that no one would ever talk to me normally at a cocktail party. And that if i moved to a small town, i would have way too much information to ever have any friends.

I still have a few weeks to plan my electives, i'll keep you posted.