As you already know, heme/onc fellowships start after a medicine residency, so you're looking at least 7 years into the future.
What I'd recommend is doing a heme elective during medical school. When you have a patient with a heme issue (e.g. during medicine and peds rotations), go look at the blood smear. I was amazed at how many smears and bone marrow aspirates showed up on Step 1.
Although I'm pretty well set on rads, there's a small piece of me that's interested in doing heme. It is research oriented, and it's a nice balance of clinical practice, lab/microscope work, and research. One of my teaching attendings during my medicine rotation is a hematologist, so I got plenty of impromptu heme lectures. If you can really learn the differential diagnosis of anemia and some basics about leukemia, lymphoma, and plasma cell dyscrasias during your third year of med school, you'll be way ahead of the pack.
Most hematologists work reasonable hours, since there are very few heme emergencies. In fact, the only "heme emergencies" I can think of are sickle cell crises (which are almost always managed adequately by the medicine/peds staff), severe anemia secondary to GI bleeding (which is handled by medicine/GI), and a blast crisis secondary to leukemia (in which case you'd get paged). As far as income goes, I think the average hematologist makes around $220K/year.
A heme/onc fellowship is a long way in the future, and most medicine residents will think about pursuing other fellowships as well (e.g. cards, renal, endo, ID, GI). Perk up your ears during your second and third years of med school and keep your options open.
Cheers,
doepug
MS III, Johns Hopkins
