I'm a senior EM resident and this post resonated with me 🙁
Not a day goes by that I wonder if I should have picked a different specialty or field altogether. The "high salary" (250k/year) isn't really that large when you consider the behemoth effort required to get to this point and the liability one assumes. And what are the perks? A life time of dealing with nonsense, answering to hospital administration, and boat-loads of charting (I have 16 charts from my shift that ended a few hours ago to finish!).
The most important part of this post is that the OP is her own boss. Controlling your work environment is such a critical aspect to happiness if you are relegated to being a wage-slave like most of the US populace. EM docs (and a lot of other specialties) are no longer in charge of their practices. Metrics, patient satisfaction, protocols, and "standard of care" pigeon hole me and my colleagues routinely. "No doctor, you cannot give that medication because it is against hospital policy to use it without getting x,y, z test and you can only run it at this rate" "No doctor, ketamine is a dangerous drug and cannot be used for that without monitoring, an RN/RT/Tech in the room, aid airway equipment close by. "No doctor, you have to properly document this diagnosis (read: bend the truth) in order to bill for a level 5 chart, otherwise the hospital loses money." My attendings answer to the medical director, who answers to the C-suite who answers to the hospital board and so on. You are a cog, utterly replaceable.
The only physicians that have similar autonomy as the OP are doctors that can still open a cash-based practice (dermatology, plastic surgery, and choices such as those) and a select few elective surgeons who bring actual profit to hospitals that lose money on other acute care services, which seem to be predominantly medicaid patients.
The problem is that as pre-meds, and even medical students, there is no conceivable way for you to understand the rigors of being a doctor, let alone what each specialty entails as an attending. I don't understand it yet to the full extent because I'm not an attending (though moonlighting has matured me considerably).
If you have rich parents like the OP, and not a mountain of debt like I do, I would consider the option of leaving or at least finishing school to get the MD and moving on to something else. I will practicing until I can pay off the debt and then ideally stumble upon some other profession. The pay cut will be welcomed because I will gain so much in other aspects of my life.
Remember this as you move on to the next post: I was just as eager as some of you during my MS4 EM audition rotation. I thought EM was the best! I even was an EMT for a while and thought that this is what I wanted. Nothing cooler than "saving a life" right? I hate to break your bubble, but I can count the amount of "true saves" I've had on one finger and my colleagues would corroborate their similar experiences too.
Medicine eats your soul one day at a time and one day you will look at yourself and wonder how the heck you got here!
