I rotated at what could be considered a gold mine for working cardiologists. The work is absolutely ridiculous. She had NPs and PAs helping her and her hours were still 7 a.m. in the morning to 7-9 pm at night, at one hospital. Then after rounding, I'd leave at 7-9 pm and she'd go to another hospital and round on those patients too. Her clinic was the usual 8-5 pm and she'd have 40-50 patients in the waiting room and would go in and out of the office with caths, rounding on patients, surgical clearances, or emergencies. A lot of the inpatient stuff was CHF, NSTEMI, STEMI, Chest Pain R/O, Hypertensive Urgency, arrhythmia (usually A-Fib) management, post-op observation. A lot of the outpatient stuff was followup of the inpatient stuff. When I met up with her at 3 or 4 pm, she'd sometimes scrounge through the nurses station and tear into a bunch of graham crackers and that would be her lunch. Half of the time she looked famished and exhausted, and the other half she was okay.
But it was crazy. I'd round on 3 floors of patients myself, help out the resident with rounding in the ICU, and then she'd show up and blast through them all, and THEN we'd go to the ER and have to deal with more chaos.
I didn't envy her. My guess is she made over a million a year. She had $4-5,000 in cash she kept on hand in her purse and when she did go on vacation she went all out because she could obviously afford it. But she worked like a ****ing dog and her husband would call her after 7pm multiple times saying food was on the table or some other married things and we would still go an hour after that. She rounded 2 weekends a month too with me, the resident, and an NP.
That said, she owned Cardio and I learned a great deal from her that I would've never learned from any of the other *******s in that hospital. And her kids are going to have very comfortable lives.
