I'm in the middle of my third week of a general surgery rotation at Mt.Clemens Regional Medical Center. I am so not planning a career in surgery, so I think my take on things may be really different than yours might be. It'd probably be best for you to do a rotation there to see if you like it. (If, for some reason there aren't any rotation slots, they might let you take weekend call one weekend, if you asked about it). I know of two students interested in general surgery who have said that they tentatively plan on ranking this program #1 (these happen to be the only two students I have talked to that plan on doing a general surgery rotation).
After reading a lot of posts about surgeons being "mean", I was really anxious about doing my general surgery rotation. I have been treated so well by all of the attendings and residents. In addition to seeing a lot, doing a lot, and learning a lot, I've really had a lot of fun on this rotation. The program director is really awesome.
They have a very busy surgery service and the residents(particularly the more senior residents) often (almost always) do the majority of the cases and the attendings are often either the first assist or observing two residents. They do work really hard,(though it sounds like this is the case for all or most surgery residency programs) but they seem to be getting really good training. Night call for PGY-2s and above is block call(possibly with the exception of weekend nights, I'm not sure). The PGY2s have do a month of trauma surgery at Sinai Grace.
I'm sure that someone who is actually planning to do a surgery residency and has rotated through multiple surgery services could give you a better description of the program, but since no one has replied to your post yet, I hope this is at least a little helpful.
Good Luck to you
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p.s. I don't know how many spots for ENT and ortho residencies they currently have. I heard that they recently cut down on the number in ENT and ortho in order to have more open FP spots. I don't know if there are just fewer ENT/Ortho slots, or if there are currently none planned for future years, so it might be a good idea to contact the hospital instead of looking online to find out what specialty surgery residencies they will be offering for the next cycle.
