What I am doing to return to Medicine and Surgery

I've been away from Medicine and Surgery for a couple of years, addressing health issues, for the most part. Now that my health is restored, I view the world with renewed optimism and am itching to return to my first love, practicing as a physician. I had completed two years of a surgical subspecialty residency which I enjoyed immensely before taking an indefinite medical leave, and eventually my time for returning to the position expired.

My approach to The Return has been twofold:

  1. Stay busy with work - i.e. GrubHub - as well as fitness, running, and reading for pleasure. Also, when I read, I'm astounded by the gaps in my fund of general knowledge about the world and seek always to remedy it, only to find the gaps expand the more I read.
  2. Monitor residency vacancies through several online platforms, including inforesidency, ResidentSwap, FindAResident by AAMC, StudentDoctorNetwork, and a few other specialized sites. 
This approach has yielded little as of yet, and I suspect this is largely due to my prolonged absence from the clinical setting as a resident. As a Program Director, I would view any such candidate with more than a passing suspicion, and the questions about him would come naturally: Why was he gone for so long? Is he ready to return? Is he a LIABILITY? As physicians, we are (unfortunately) bred to consider potential liabilities in all of our daily decision-making for a variety of reasons. For instance, in the back of a typical physician's mind during every interaction looms the veiled giant monster of a Lawsuit. On an unrelated note, prevention of lawsuit is a large but hard to quantify contributor to the rising cost of healthcare nowadays. Countless CT scans have been performed with the implicit, often subconscious, notion to prevent a lawsuit for missing a diagnosis. Because we cannot scan the thoughts of the ordering physicians, it is impossible to tell how many needless tests were ordered on at least partially such a basis. In any case, I'm rambling thus merely to try and scan the brains of program directors viewing my CV and deciding whether to drop it into the virtual recycling bin or not. 

Thus far, most programs I've applied to (eg. Preliminary Surgery) have chosen not to pursue me as I do them, and few have bothered to even write "We had many outstanding applicants...Unfortunately, we are unable to...wishing you the best in your future endeavors," or some such euphemistic platitude. I don't know what's worse, receiving a concrete letter of rejection or floating in the purgatory of a non-response. 

Even so, I've received a few interviews from nice programs, and I will write about them in the coming posts. In the meantime, I have a scheduled GrubHub session to prepare for. I will stay hungry.



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