CNN iReport:Sorry, but nobody works harder than surgeons

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footballrules

footballrules

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"As a surgical resident in an academic medical center, I start the day at 4 am and I am working at full speed until around 6pm when things slow down (assuming no traumas come to the ER), and then I usually get most work done by 8pm. Anything left over goes to the resident on call. I am the resident on-call every third or fourth night, which means I don't sleep for 30 hours or more for that period. I never have time to eat during the day, and I have to make time to even pee. I think about quitting every day, but in the end I've invested way too much to leave it all now. The rules say I'm not supposed to work more than 80 hours a week, but I am consistently at 90-110 hours a week. There is just way too much to do and not enough surgeons to handle all the patients who need to be taken care of. I work at least 6 days a week, sometimes 12 days in a row, and I've done this for about 4 years now after med school, and this is pretty typical for any surgeon, so the idea of a 4 day work week, or any work week under 80 hours, is an absolute joke to me. If anyone says surgeons make too much money, they clearly have no idea what a surgeon goes through or how the medical system works."

Hmm, he has to make time to pee but he has time to send an iReport to CNN?

Take a few minutes to read the comments.

Here is the link: http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-60771
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It shows the ignorance of the average population. The only way to show people the "poop" doctors have to put up with is to either have them see it first hand or have physicians take a stand. Taking a stand is out of the question.
 
footballrules said:
"As a surgical resident in an academic medical center, I start the day at 4 am and I am working at full speed until around 6pm when things slow down (assuming no traumas come to the ER), and then I usually get most work done by 8pm. Anything left over goes to the resident on call. I am the resident on-call every third or fourth night, which means I don't sleep for 30 hours or more for that period. I never have time to eat during the day, and I have to make time to even pee. I think about quitting every day, but in the end I've invested way too much to leave it all now. The rules say I'm not supposed to work more than 80 hours a week, but I am consistently at 90-110 hours a week. There is just way too much to do and not enough surgeons to handle all the patients who need to be taken care of. I work at least 6 days a week, sometimes 12 days in a row, and I've done this for about 4 years now after med school, and this is pretty typical for any surgeon, so the idea of a 4 day work week, or any work week under 80 hours, is an absolute joke to me. If anyone says surgeons make too much money, they clearly have no idea what a surgeon goes through or how the medical system works."

Hmm, he has to make time to pee but he has time to send an iReport to CNN?

Take a few minutes to read the comments.

Here is the link: http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-60771
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i talked to a friend that just recently finished her residency and she said that it IS very time consuming and it IS very stressful.. but i don't think it was as bad as this guy said it was on this report....
 
Oh boo hoo! He knew what he was getting himself into!

He probably loves his job and just likes to whine on occasion like we all do.

Yeah, residents make crap for money. But they make up for it in other ways.

Surgeons do work harder than anyone else, but most surgeons love it anyways when it comes down to it. :rolleyes:
 
Yeah, residents make crap for money. But they make up for it in other ways.
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What ways would those be? Residency just seems like a gauntlet you have to get through before you can practice on your own. There's not much redeeming about it.
 
Some of the comments were pretty ridiculous.
 
that1guy // 2 hours ago "Sorry, but nobody works harder than surgeons"

Are you ******ed?? You have obviously never seen the show 'Deadliest Catch'.




This made me laugh.
 
taXi said:
that1guy // 2 hours ago "Sorry, but nobody works harder than surgeons"

Are you ******ed?? You have obviously never seen the show 'Deadliest Catch'.




This made me laugh.
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Same here, that was my pick for comment of the week. Are people really like this?
 
The comments that boil down to 'hey, I work 80+ hours a week and don't make much money and hate my job, so the doctors need to stop whining' are what really stick in my craw. Odds are, you didn't have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars over 8 years for that job opportunity, and then have another 3-7 years of making $9 an hour after that before you got a shot at a real paycheck. Just, ugh....:slap:
 
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taXi said:
that1guy // 2 hours ago "Sorry, but nobody works harder than surgeons"

Are you ******ed?? You have obviously never seen the show 'Deadliest Catch'.




This made me laugh.
Click to expand...

While surgery residency does suck, I'm sure working 16 hour shifts on a tiny little fishing boat on the verge of capsizing in freezing cold water hundreds of miles off the Alaskan coast is a little worse.
 
PreMedPrincess said:
Panda Bear?
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Oh, they work hard all right...and long hours too. But a lot of their time is wasted on the usual inefficiencies of medicine in general and teaching hospitals in particular which, since they have so much cheap labor firmly grasped by the gonads, have exactly zero incentive to change anything.

You have to love surgery to do it. Otherwise you won't survive. You will also be divorced by your third year if you are married as there is no time for a family life and you and your spouse will just drift apart.

Any residency, by the way, will put a strain on any marriage. Surgery is just the most extreme. You come home and find that you have nothing to give.
 
roseglass6370 said:
Oh boo hoo! He knew what he was getting himself into!

He probably loves his job and just likes to whine on occasion like we all do.

Yeah, residents make crap for money. But they make up for it in other ways.

Surgeons do work harder than anyone else, but most surgeons love it anyways when it comes down to it. :rolleyes:
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No. This is not true. Residency blows on an objective level. Long hours, low pay, stress, constant criticism. It's not that difficult to understand and many of you are way over-thinking it.

Medicine, if you let it, will suck the life out of you and give you nothing in return. This Mother****er does not love you back.
 
imagine how bad it will be if people just barely making over 250,000 will enter a bracket with a huge tax increase...your 100 hr week has the possibility to go to 120, yikes
 
wasteoftime said:
imagine how bad it will be if people just barely making over 250,000 will enter a bracket with a huge tax increase...your 100 hr week has the possibility to go to 120, yikes
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It doesn't work like that. It's graduated, so the first 10k are untaxed, 10-30k is like 15%, 30-60k is like 20%, 60-150k is like 30%, and then 240k+ is taxed 39.6%. So just cause someone "hits" the next tax bracket doesn't mean their tax bill goes up dramatically.
 
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Panda Bear said:
No. This is not true. Residency blows on an objective level. Long hours, low pay, stress, constant criticism. It's not that difficult to understand and many of you are way over-thinking it.

Medicine, if you let it, will suck the life out of you and give you nothing in return. This Mother****er does not love you back.
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:scared:
 
Panda Bear said:
Oh, they work hard all right...and long hours too. But a lot of their time is wasted on the usual inefficiencies of medicine in general and teaching hospitals in particular which, since they have so much cheap labor firmly grasped by the gonads, have exactly zero incentive to change anything.

You have to love surgery to do it. Otherwise you won't survive. You will also be divorced by your third year if you are married as there is no time for a family life and you and your spouse will just drift apart.

Any residency, by the way, will put a strain on any marriage. Surgery is just the most extreme. You come home and find that you have nothing to give.
Click to expand...

Panda Bear said:
No. This is not true. Residency blows on an objective level. Long hours, low pay, stress, constant criticism. It's not that difficult to understand and many of you are way over-thinking it.

Medicine, if you let it, will suck the life out of you and give you nothing in return. This Mother****er does not love you back.
Click to expand...

These two things are exactly what I wanted to hear while writing my secondaries :laugh:

Thanks PandaBear!
 
Bradstein said:
It doesn't work like that. It's graduated, so the first 10k are untaxed, 10-30k is like 15%, 30-60k is like 20%, 60-150k is like 30%, and then 240k+ is taxed 39.6%. So just cause someone "hits" the next tax bracket doesn't mean their tax bill goes up dramatically.
Click to expand...
I was referring to some new tax plans being thrown around out there. If that happens, a lot of people are going to be discouraged from going into surgery.
 
Lol. The guys on Deadliest Catch work like 2 months a year. Sure it sucks more than being in the OR, but let's compare:

$60,000 for 2 months work vs. $40,000 for 12 months of work.
 
If you guys think that the life of a surgeon gets dramatically better after residency ends...you are wrong. My brother just started his "real" job (he's a neurosurgeon) and he works NONSTOP. I know because I've shadowed him. He rounds at 6 and works until 8 or nine at night...that's when he's not on call. When he has time off, he still has to check on his patients. It is a *very* hard life, and it is total crap when people say that surgeons make too much money etc. This is all after 4 years of college, 4 years of med school, 6 years residency and 2 years of fellowship. I think the guys comment was spot on.
 
The original comments are quite right - some pre-meds on here questioning this resident make me wonder how they know so much? My brother just got to his fifth year of a gen surg residency, and during his fourth he lived at the hospital for ~4 months while working about 110 hours/week and on trauma call many nights. Not to mention his wife decided to call it quits and he was refused ANY time off to try and save his marriage (not even a drop to about 80 hours for a couple weeks was available). He was told to suck it up or get out. The general surgery program is an absolute disaster at most academic centers - the worst thing is, if you complain to a higher power (AMA maybe, don't know exactly who regulates) about clear violations of hours restrictions, etc., your program gets disbanded and you lose all the work you've put in to that point (not to mention all your colleagues too!). This happened at Johns Hopkins recently. It is very hard to then get picked up by another program, so you're basically stuck. There are very high rates of attrition among 3rd and 4th year gen surg residents, estimated between 20 and 35 percent dropping out citing poor treatment from superiors and similar issues! Yet the old guard still is sticking to the hard lilne that if you can't 'handle' it like they did you should get out. Unfortunately with the changing health care environment we could be looking at a massive shortage of general surgeons because of this approach.
 
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MightyDucksMan said:
The general surgery program is an absolute disaster at most academic centers - the worst thing is, if you complain to a higher power (AMA maybe, don't know exactly who regulates) about clear violations of hours restrictions, etc., your program gets disbanded and you lose all the work you've put in to that point (not to mention all your colleagues too!). This happened at Johns Hopkins recently.
Click to expand...
I'm sorry, I missed your point.

What exactly happened at Hopkins?
 
hopefuldoc87 said:
These two things are exactly what I wanted to hear while writing my secondaries :laugh:

Thanks PandaBear!
Click to expand...

Just to clarify, and this may only apply to those of you who are married, when I say that medicine doesn't love you back, I mean simply that the toll it takes on your family life is not worth the positive aspects of the profession. This is why I laugh at the the desire of many of you to unload all of your compassion on the Holy Underserved. The people in your life who will be truly underserved are your family. Your patients have their own families and you are just another face in a white coat. A pleasant one, perhaps, or even slightly annoying but they will forget about you the minute you walk out of their room. The emotional capital you expend, however, that hard-to-define something that they take out of you can never be replaced and when you go home, the danger is that you will have nothing left of it for the people who are really important.

Residency does wear you out. Surgery residents have it particularly bad but most of us at one time or another look around and say, with feeling and total honesty, had we known what we would really have to sacrifice we would never have gotten involved with This Mother****er.
 
Panda Bear said:
Just to clarify, and this may only apply to those of you who are married, when I say that medicine doesn't love you back, I mean simply that the toll it takes on your family life is not worth the positive aspects of the profession. This is why I laugh at the the desire of many of you to unload all of your compassion on the Holy Underserved. The people in your life who will be truly underserved are your family. Your patients have their own families and you are just another face in a white coat. A pleasant one, perhaps, or even slightly annoying but they will forget about you the minute you walk out of their room. The emotional capital you expend, however, that hard-to-define something that they take out of you can never be replaced and when you go home, the danger is that you will have nothing left of it for the people who are really important.

Residency does wear you out. Surgery residents have it particularly bad but most of us at one time or another look around and say, with feeling and total honesty, had we known what we would really have to sacrifice we would never have gotten involved with This Mother****er.
Click to expand...

Panda Bear does a great job of smashing the holy grail pre-med mindset.

Pre-med student :slap:Panda Bear
 
Panda Bear said:
Just to clarify, and this may only apply to those of you who are married, when I say that medicine doesn't love you back, I mean simply that the toll it takes on your family life is not worth the positive aspects of the profession. This is why I laugh at the the desire of many of you to unload all of your compassion on the Holy Underserved. The people in your life who will be truly underserved are your family. Your patients have their own families and you are just another face in a white coat. A pleasant one, perhaps, or even slightly annoying but they will forget about you the minute you walk out of their room. The emotional capital you expend, however, that hard-to-define something that they take out of you can never be replaced and when you go home, the danger is that you will have nothing left of it for the people who are really important.

Residency does wear you out. Surgery residents have it particularly bad but most of us at one time or another look around and say, with feeling and total honesty, had we known what we would really have to sacrifice we would never have gotten involved with This Mother****er.
Click to expand...

The money is about all that there is left. If medicine didn't pay well you would be absolutely crazy to do it, especially since the largest part of your job, in any specialty, will be total bull****. I am very sure that at least half if not more of the millions of dollars that have flowed through my hands in the last three years have been absolutely wasted for all the good they did. Frittered away on defensive medicine, ineffective therapies, futile care, and the whole crazy combination goat rodeo and sausage factory that is American medicine.
 
Panda Bear said:
Just to clarify, and this may only apply to those of you who are married, when I say that medicine doesn't love you back, I mean simply that the toll it takes on your family life is not worth the positive aspects of the profession. This is why I laugh at the the desire of many of you to unload all of your compassion on the Holy Underserved. The people in your life who will be truly underserved are your family. Your patients have their own families and you are just another face in a white coat. A pleasant one, perhaps, or even slightly annoying but they will forget about you the minute you walk out of their room. The emotional capital you expend, however, that hard-to-define something that they take out of you can never be replaced and when you go home, the danger is that you will have nothing left of it for the people who are really important.

Residency does wear you out. Surgery residents have it particularly bad but most of us at one time or another look around and say, with feeling and total honesty, had we known what we would really have to sacrifice we would never have gotten involved with This Mother****er.
Click to expand...

I hope you didn't think I was doubting you or anything. I can only imagine the strain on the left over life most residents have. I was merely saying that the timing on reading that comment was terrible for me considering I had just gotten an inspiration to finish off my final secondaries.

Thanks for the warning though.
 
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Thanks Scarletgirl - I knew something had happened there but was fuzzy on the details.
 
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