Part of the tradition of starting a new job is to get a verbal handover from the previous registrar. I called up the current Vascular Surgery reg at my hospital yesterday to get the juice.
This has not helped my nervousness.
She firstly reassured me that it was an excellent job, with lots of cutting (which means the trainee gets to operate – vital for learning skills and becoming a better surgeon).
However, if there’s one negative about this job, it’s the hours. It is set up as shared call with the vascular surgery fellow. In effect, this means one week in two on call. This means one week will be working normal working hours, and the next will be the same, but with the pager on through the evening and overnight. And I’ll work both weekend days for my oncall week, too.
Can anyone say “baptism of fire?”
She also told me I need to find someone to cook for me, as if I don’t, I won’t eat. Seeing as I currently eat a lot of half-chewed crusts and leftover porridge (more than my regular requirements) I may need some time to adjust.
The final warning was that on my weekend off, I won’t have the energy to “go out and do something” so I will feel like I have no life. I may not miss my raging cafe/party lifestyle that much. 🙂
So I’ll be the person lying on the floor asleep, with three kids with adjustment disorders climbing all over me.
I’ll volunteer to cook for you – by which I mean I will take photos of my own meal while I am cooking it and SMS them to you so that you don’t feel that you are missing out on the creative process.
Wow, Cris.
What’s the difference between a registrar and a fellow? In India, fellows were called registrars.
I’d cook for you, but then you’d have to marry me. 🙂
It’s terrible that I’ve made it through med school and my intern year and have to qualify the following with “I think”…. but I THINK a fellow is someone who has completed their training program (and hence can put FRACS after their name) but is not working as a consultant (due to not finding such a position or undertaking extra training/research or some other reason….).
[warning: long sentence]
I also think that if you compare the additional earnings from nutso on-call with what it may cost to buy good-quality meals made by some person who does have a life, purchasing meals would normally elicit a “But I could make that for less than half the price!!” is justifiable. Sure you COULD make it for a whole lot less, but sometimes the reality is that your time is worth more than your money.
Perhaps I need to pay someone to make that sentence shorter… and to shred my mountain of patient lists that has been accumulating next to my shredder for at least 10 months. Unfortunately the pile has grown to the extent that it has engulfed the shredder…
@purplesque: @yay is correct. A registrar is a training Dr (also called resident in some countries, but that means something different here), and a fellow is someone who has finished their training and got their ticket. At that stage they apply to a subspecialty program, or choose a hospital to employ them to get further experience with some form of supervision prior to setting up private Practise.
However in this situation, the term fellow is a legacy word. The vascular surgery training program used to only accept surgeons fully trained general surgeons for further training. Now they split from the general training program earlier, before the second part exams. So in his instance the fellow is the vascular trainee and the registrar is the general surgical trainee (me).
Ah..interesting. My husband is going to finish his residency (general surgery training-5 years) and then start a two year vascular surgery fellowship (subspecialty training under supervision) next year. Unlike urology, vascular still doesn’t split from General Surgery early (in the US), though they are trying.
I completely agree with @yay about the cooking/food bit- your time (by which I mostly mean your sleep) is going to be the most important thing. Good luck! I also think that anyone who’s raising three children would not find any kind of surgical training harder than what she’s already doing at home.
@purplesque: Yeah, your terminology seems to match ours, except we use the term “registrar” instead of “resident”. Our residents are hospital medical officers, before they enter a training program. We only commit to a training stream in 2nd or 3rd postgraduate year.
As for cooking, I am hoping hubby will cook for me sometimes. I have been an at home mum (part time PhD actually doesn’t count here) for the last 18months, so I have been doing a lot of the weekly cooking. This year we will have a Nanny feeding the kids, so at least that is taken care of.
As for the comparison between being a parent and being a surgical registrar, I have many thoughts on that. I reckon I need to expand those in another post. But I will say that the skills involved are quite different, so proficiency at one doesn’t necessarily translate. Plus, I don’t want to stop being a mother of three just because I am back at work….