Great post, SilkyJ!
OP, you will definitely find a partner/spouse and that will work out.
What needs to be said is that being an oral and maxillofacial surgeon doesn’t end with the residency. It is not a job where, when you leave at 5 PM (4 PM?), you can walk away from everything.
OMS is a mission. And I knew it going in...my mom told me. I was meant to do this.
I take things home with patients that I have to think about, and inconveniently at the same time that our kids need to have a parent present...especially emotionally.
I do long cases in which I don’t know what time I’ll get home.
I once had a patient who developed a pseudoaneurysm of the maxillary artery two weeks after a Le Fort osteotomy (which is rare), and I was gone from home for 2 days. The patient survived and is alive and well, but it took two years off my life.
My wife and I are blessed that she does not have to work, even though she is impeccably credentialed. She was the valedictorian of her high school class. She was an excellent nurse at the Mayo Clinic.
Now, she is all about the kids. She told me that the ride home from picking the kids up from school was the best part of the day because the kids would tell her everything in that short ride. By the time I get home, and I ask, everything is “fine.”
Moreover, from a clinical standpoint, you will always be on-call. You are the emergency room for the entire dental profession. Many a time I have been called on a weekend or before a school concert or a youth hockey game to go and treat a patient.
Once, I had the four older boys (ages 10 to 6) in the minivan on our way to the Science Museum (which they LOVED), and was called to go see a 16-year-old with a facial fracture. I was not technically on-call, but I turned around. It was a long drive home.
My wife and I would not change a thing.
