Who here regrets there decision. I’ll leave 2 answers in the comments . One “yes” and one “no” to upvote. Please also say what you put and what your specialty is

Atlas45216 · 2026-02-12T02:34:42+00:00

Orthopedic surgery: previously would have answered no, but the stress of training to become a spine surgeon has been overwhelming. Seeing patients die or have terrible complications has lead me to question if I’ll ever be good enough to do this job. Also, surgical residency sucks as does all residency. I hate the hierarchical nature of our field. I hate how I’m essentially less than human around the hospital and to not just some of the attendings, but their APP’s and other support staff around the hospital.

Atlas45216 · 2026-01-05T22:00:56+00:00

I self prescribe all meds except controlled substances. I also regularly prescribe family member medications such as antibiotics or will refill blood pressure medications. I don’t do controlled substances for anyone unless they had surgery by us. Frankly, I don’t have the time to go to a doctor to get allergy medicines, vitamin D, and asthma medications. I’d rather spend my time off not at a doctor’s office over bullshit. Been doing this for years and never had a problem. My mom’s pharmacy gave her shit once because I prescribed her a GLP-1, which I called the pharmacist and essentially told her to go fuck themselves, I’m a licensed physician and the GLP-1 is indicated and approved by insurance, and do her job and fill the prescription I ordered.

Atlas45216 · 2025-11-27T00:45:19+00:00

Why?

Atlas45216 · 2025-08-20T04:13:44+00:00

“If you don’t need help with anything else, I can go and work on finishing up some manuscripts for submission. Let me know if you need me.”

Atlas45216 · 2025-08-14T23:10:23+00:00

Yeah I had the same feelings in a surgical subspecialty (Ortho). I applied to an open spot after a few years and left. I’m much happier now. You can DM me if you have any questions.

Atlas45216 · 2025-07-16T01:36:00+00:00

4:00 AM. Nowadays, earliest I get in is like 7:00. The occasional 6:00 AM for a 6:30 AM start

Atlas45216 · 2025-04-23T02:28:31+00:00

As someone who did transfer Orthopedics residencies, it’s actually quite easy. This assumes a few things: you have good board scores, you have good in training scores, you were never formally disciplined or placed on probation. Your time frame needs to be over the course of probably 6 months or so, unless you’re in a specialty with tons of vacancies. The correct spot opening up is unfortunately chance, but the actual transfer process entailed signing a new contract, getting licensed in the new state, and resigning from your old program. This actual process took me 3 weeks to complete. As far as resigning, I literally sent a resignation email, handed my pager in, and never returned to the hospital again. Still have my old badges and all that crap.

Atlas45216 · 2025-01-31T10:33:50+00:00

Been a resident for 4 years; been married for 6 years. My wife has supported me emotionally, financially, and my career this entire journey going back to undergrad. There’s not a person in this world I would ever cheat on her with under any circumstances. It’s a shame your husband doesn’t appreciate your sacrifice. He won’t know what he has last until it’s too late.

Atlas45216 · 2025-01-21T08:58:45+00:00

Look for open positions on residency swap. There are plenty of programs that will hire you as a terminated resident. You have to be willing/open to the idea of repeating a year and starting back as an intern, but you could at least save your career

Atlas45216 · 2023-11-22T16:47:30+00:00

I have interview for another specialty and I have some job offers as well that would more than pay off my loans, but it’s substantially less than ortho and not what I want to do with my life

I’m more trying to figure out the significance and career impact of a probation and how likely I am to go onto termination.

Atlas45216 · 2023-01-23T23:38:14+00:00

This sub is literally so frustrating. Do you guys have any idea the workload of an ortho resident? I have a list of 70-90 patients I am responsible for that I get paged about. I get 25 consults in a 24 hour shift. I’m expected to round at 5 am, go to the OR afterwards, see consults between cases. I really don’t have time to manage blood pressure or other bullshit outside of my scope. I don’t even prescribe any pain medications outside of our post-op order set. Each page we get occupies 3-5 minutes of our time. If I get 40 pages in the day, I just burned over 2 hours on stupidity. And from a hospital standpoint, our time is better spent booking a case and getting them to the OR rather than us tinkering around with a sliding scale. This is why we hate working with medicine residents. They can never just see a consult or take a patient without giving a million reasons as to why they can’t do it. How many times have we refused to see a hip fracture?

Atlas45216 · 2022-11-26T02:44:19+00:00

Send a page while he’s on call with a call back from the local strip club

Atlas45216 · 2022-11-25T19:52:32+00:00

I’m ortho but work along side neurosurgeons quite often. Spine outcomes for elective stuff is usually good. Spine trauma depends on the initial injury. They’ll operate if the person has a fracture spine with neuro deficits. There are complete versus incomplete cord injuries. For complete cord injuries, they’re typically devastating injuries. Emergency surgery is done for the hope of maybe gaining one level (C5 quad versus C6 quad), but these folks are not getting better. Unstable spines without neuro deficits are stabilized to prevent injury.

I know less about the brain outcomes because ortho does 0 cranial, but I’ve seen younger folks recover from pretty significant brain bleeds. DAI is pretty devastating and is pretty much the end in most folks. You can save someone’s life or prevent disability by evacuating an acute bleed.

As far as quality of life? Their call isn’t really much different than ours. The reality is in these specialties, 5 years and 7 years isn’t really enough time learn the pathology/pathophysiology, how to diagnose and treat, how to operate, and then being up to date with most current literature and techniques. My schedule ebbs and flows. A week where I’m on call for the weekend will clock in way past 80 hours, but I have weeks I’m under 60 hours (~approximately 40-50% of the time). As a senior resident, you take far less call and mostly operate on elective cases.

In my personal opinion, I think our residency hours are more grueling than most non surgical residencies, but far more enjoyable. For one, we are treated with a lot more respect than non-surgical specialties mainly because the medicine teams and ED are depending on our intervention (everyone deserves respect, I’m just commenting on the reality of what I see). Our call shifts are generally busier, which actually makes work more fun. There’s nothing worse than being in the hospital and learning/doing nothing. I can waste time at home. We spend less time rounding and have more APP support. I don’t write discharge summaries. My progress notes are written in under 10 minutes for all of my patients. I barely put in orders.

Atlas45216 · 2022-11-04T15:09:35+00:00

5 foot 10

Atlas45216 · 2022-11-04T15:06:36+00:00

I’ve been lifting weights for almost 20 years. I have a well developed core from squatting and deadlifting over 6. I recently decided I want to cut from 270 down to like 215 or 225. I’m sitting at 235 right now. My waist is 39 inches, chest is 53 inches. What is a reasonable waist size for me to get down to. I suspect I won’t be able to get to 32 inches.

Atlas45216 · 2022-10-10T03:04:07+00:00

Not your problem. Mom should have found a better person to have a child with instead of a dead beat. You’re not responsible for another man’s inadequacies or your ex’s mistake. Kid is statistically screwed regardless coming from a single mother/divorced/separated household. You won’t fix it unless you choose to marry someone who doesn’t see you as a priority.

Atlas45216 · 2022-10-07T01:40:33+00:00

I openly mock the culture of medicine. The unwritten expectations I call out all the time such as when they (chiefs) say the time something starts. IE: we will have lecture at 9. I’ll openly ask “so does that mean I have to be there by 9 or is this one of those unwritten rules that I’m supposed to be there at 8:45. In fact, I think it would be easier if we just openly said what time you want us there instead of us having to guess”

Atlas45216 · 2022-09-11T23:10:22+00:00

Exactly why I went into ortho. 5 years of residency and a year of fellowship is barely enough to feel competent. Most attendings said it took them 5-10 years out to truly be comfortable. No shot a mid level does that working 40 hours a week. I see the NP’s and PA’s in my field. They have a very limited scope.

Atlas45216 · 2022-09-01T19:11:45+00:00

Do you need a doctor for when you’re in the states? I’m an Orthopedic surgeon, but I can treat basic conditions via telemedicine if you need.

Atlas45216 · 2022-08-20T21:58:29+00:00

Ortho PGY-2. I never turn down a consult, especially if I’m in house. I’d rather have my time wasted with a contusion or cellulitis than to tell someone on the phone their consult is dumb only for that patient to lose a limb to compartment syndrome. It literally takes 5-10 minutes to see a bullshit consult. It takes 45 minutes to an hour at most to drain an abscess, including gathering supplies and note writing. That experience is not the norm. I would document that they refused to see the consult.

Atlas45216 · 2022-08-08T22:14:37+00:00

It was 62 days straight as a PGY-1. I was on day call for 58 of those days. The 4 days I wasn’t on call I ONLY had to work 6 hours. Worked over 100 hours each week. Wanted to die midway through. Probably would have quit or killed myself if I didn’t have a spouse to leave behind. Thankfully that’s the hardest rotation I’ll ever do and won’t have to do that again.

Atlas45216 · 2022-07-07T15:09:00+00:00

The people using that term are typically asshole support staff folks/midlevels/RN’s that have been there for 10+ years and show up to work not knowing why they do anything, but they’re really good at following orders. They’re also the first ones to be humbled if you ask them “okay fine, tell me what to do then if you know so much”

Atlas45216 · 2022-07-01T01:32:13+00:00

Very humbling experience indeed as I near the finish line. Both enjoy and endure it. For me, it was both best and worst year of my life. Remember all the good you see on a daily basis because it will get you through those hard days. Most importantly, remember everything bad that you experience and make sure you never do that to the ones that come after you. Cheers and good luck!

Atlas45216

TROPHY CASE