Hey blueintheface,
It's kind of odd how I ended up in path, but since you asked, I'll share.
My decision to leave rads probably had more to do with the program I was at than radiology itself. I won't go into the details or even reveal the place for obvious reasons, but lets just say that it wasn't a good training environment. Since I was unhappy with my work place, and because I also felt I could do other things in medicine, i decided to talk to the PD and see if he would let me go to pursue other things. Luckily, the PD was nice enough to release me since he had plenty of other people who wanted to fill my position.
After leaving, I was ready to flip burgers for the year and reapply through the match. The problem was I didn't know what to do. I considered IM since I had already finished a prelim year, but the thought of q4 overnight call again made me cringe. To help with my decision process, I decided to visit the path department at the local med school to see if I could do some research. It was then that fate intevened because literally one day before I arrived, the path program had an unexpected opening because one of the residents had to leave for personal reasons. I was asked if I would be interested in applying and within a span of 48 hours I went from rads to path resident. Just to give you a little perspective, this all happened during my first month in july!
In retrospect, i probably left my rads program too early. It's my own weakness in that when things get bad, I tend to bail rather than wait it out. I think that had I been at another program for radiology, I probably would be over in the radiology forum right now instead of here. Nevertheless, since coming to path, i have never been happier. Compared to rads, I like path better because there are many more facets to pathology than rads. Not only is there surg path, but there is autopsy, forensics, and the whole world of clincial pathology including my favorite, transfusion medicine. I particularly like TM because it gives the clinically inclined the opportunity to work with patients in areas like apheresis and coag consults.
Radiology is very similar to surgical pathology and I think the two specialties attract the same type of person. I find practicing surgical patholgy more appealing than rads because the signouts are more definitive and the whole added dimension of immunohistochemitry, EM, IF, cytogenetics, etc... really adds to the overall appeal of practicing pathology. In other words, I feel like I have more definitive answers with path than with rads. I don't want to take anything away from rads because they can do some pretty amazing stuff with shades of black and white. I just personally didn't enjoy or appreciate the subtleties of radiology. Anyhow, I also found that being able to gross specimens in broke up the montony of reading slides and provided another dimension to pathology. When I was doing rads, I would spend 8-10 hours literally in one chair looking at radiograph after radiograph. The situation was made worse by the fact that I looked at my watch every 10 minutes. Unfortunately, I didn't recognize in medical school that reading out radiographs for 2-3 hours as a student was a lot different then doing it for 8-10 hours as a resident. Of course there is more to radiology then just reading out films (such as the interventional stuff), and I didn't stick around long enough to find out if I would have liked it. At this point it doesn't really matter because I am perfectly content staying in path. I'm glad things worked out the way they did because I now have the perfect combination of lifestyle and work satisfaction. Someone once said to me that pathology is medicine's best kept secret. I couldn't agree with that more.
Sorry for digressing so far off topic. Anyhow, that's my story.
