Since my program is on a monthly rotation schedule, last Thursday was the last day of my 2-month surgpath rotation at our busiest site, which is private practice at a community hospital that serves a more middle class and affluent patient population than our main academic hospital. So, it seems appropriate to finish my “Adventures in Grossing, Part I” post from 2 weeks ago now. As I think I mentioned in that previous post, my first day at this site (right after I just had gotten back from almost 10 hours of traveling due to layovers coming back from USCAP and getting a migraine during my flight to boot), was a disaster to say the very least.
I had made the mistake of jokingly saying to my rotation director that I was the most CP oriented of those in my year (I’m the last 2nd year to rotate at this site this year)…and he had mistakenly heard my statement as “I dislike surgpath and because of that probably wouldn’t work hard at this rotation.” We were reminiscing about it today as we had our face-to-face end of the rotation evaluation about how much has changed since that first day.
Communication is very important and sometimes that also entails knowing what not to say in a situation, especially if it can be misinterpreted. Luckily for me, after I had another talk with my rotation director, he was willing to ‘start fresh’ and see whether his initial impression of me held true. We did not work together again until the end of the month as I was assigned to other attendings during the interim. But by the time, we were assigned together again, he was “happy” with what he had heard about me from the other attendings.
As a first year, I had heard rumors about how hard this site and some of the attendings were…the stuff of legend so to speak. First years do not rotate at this site as we need to build up our grossing and time management skills to be able to adequately manage the higher volume of grossing at this site. We have a three-day schedule that includes two days allotted to finish grossing and a third intra-operative consultation day which includes frozen sections, sentinel node touch preps, and intra-op gross examination of specimens.
I still need to work on my grossing speed and time management skills but after two months of instruction and experience at this site, I do recognize that I have improved. It’s almost the end of my second year and I generally do fine with diagnoses at sign-out because they are either things I’ve seen before or things that I have some time to read about prior to sign-out. But when it comes to unknown conferences or my RISE surgical pathology scores for the past two years, I know that I am horribly deficient and need some work.
In two months, I will be transferring to a much smaller program in my home state for personal family reasons. My medical school friend will be one of the chiefs next year and one of their incoming first years is also from my medical school. Plus, they rotate mainly at one site and do 1-2 rotations/year at another site that is near where my parents live and where I went to medical school. So it will be different than my current program which has 27 residents that rotate at four sites. The culture also seems very different and I worry that I may be behind the curve in terms of my surgical pathology (SP) knowledge. I’m not worried about CP as my strengths and background are in CP.
So, I’ve been wondering…what are some good resources to learn SP and some good approaches to learn while busy on rotations? I still haven’t found a good solution to these questions yet.
–Betty Chung, DO, MPH, MA is a second year resident physician at the University of Illinois Hospital and Health Sciences System in Chicago, IL.
Lablogatory 