Did I make mistake picking anesthesia?

[Beach bum]

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Hi, I’m a CA1 at large academic hospital and quite frankly fairly unhappy with my residency experience and anesthesia in general. I’m writing to see if my feelings are typical or if I need to consider other options. My end game is likely not practicing general anesthesia but rather chronic pain (hospital employed) or hospital administration. I am not overly interested in the physiology of anesthesia and the leadership from my PD and chair is non-existent. IThe work environment is such that I dread going into work. I also am not feeling gratified or fulfilled by the work. I don’t feel like I’m helping people, though I recognize that occurs in many medical specialties. I look at what attendings do on a daily basis and recognize that it is different from what residents must do to a certain degree but the broad strokes are the same. I’m wondering if what I’m feeling is typical and common and if people recommend just sucking it up and do whatever I need to do to match into chronic pain, realizing that there is a possibility that the grass is not greener.

Not having read any of the thread my inclination is to say a resounding yes get out of anesthesia! If you wanted to be an administrator perhaps med school wasn’t such a great idea?? Bing an administrator requires a particular skill set that does not immediately relate to what is required to be a good clinician. Also if you want to do pain to “help people”. I am not sure how satisfying you would find the typical pain practice! If you are miserable doing something you obviously need to figure out why. Also how did you end up in a field where you are so miserable?

 

[GassYous]

I think you should rule out a few things before you make a decision about changing specialty:
1. Make sure you don’t have depression; that would make everything look dark and worthless
2. Make sure you have fixed your personal life; active personal issues can ruin easily the outlook of our life, job, career etc; if single, go out, enjoy life, date normal ppl etc; if married, troubleshoot what appears to be broken
3. Take a trip somewhere nice, relax, turn off everything and appreciate how lucky and blessed you are for what u have achieved so far
4. Set goals and make your brain eliminate the noise till you reach that goal. I hated cholecystectomies, ortho cases and almost all the bread and butter cases but 4 yrs flied and luckily I ended up doing what I loved the most: cardiac critical care, cardiac anesthesia, echo and so forth
5. Sometimes we experience what is called obsession compulsion when experiencing an unexpected stress; figure out what it is (your performance? your attendings? your PD? you comparing yourself with you peers? Etc) because that might be the reason why you are obsessing about not being in the right field
6. After you check all of the above, and if you still feel strongly about it, change specialty. You will forget this year and how you felt very quickly 100000%

Good luck!

Ps. I do psychiatry as a side job lol

I like choles and ortho because of higher start units and blocks