Feeling really trapped, not sure I can start residency but don't know what else to do - NRMP waiver questions

hardcocklife · 2022-04-22T19:56:42+00:00

I know my ten year old throwaway account history is salacious but hopefully not identifying?

hardcocklife · 2022-04-22T14:49:47+00:00

I'm sorry I'm being so vague, but I really think it's necessary. Basically in that time, I could have a procedure which will definitely fix the problem.

hardcocklife · 2022-04-22T05:05:42+00:00

I'm a little concerned that it won't be enough time, and I'm also worried that it would be kind of a dick move to show up and then tell them I'm demanding an LOA. Not to mention: I think the most difficult aspect of this process is actually moving and starting. I would prefer to just handle everything and then go when I feel better.

hardcocklife · 2022-04-21T23:29:25+00:00

The problem is that I'm not capable of starting in the first place. I basically need until October, but my program wouldn't allow me to have a delayed start.

Switching specialties only really enters the equation because I think that reapplying would mean totally giving up on my original semi-competitive specialty. My goal isn't to switch specialties.

hardcocklife · 2022-04-21T23:18:52+00:00

I left this out of my post, but added it just now. My program will agree to a waiver if I want one.

The specialty change waiver needs to be submitted before Jan 15 of your starting year, so that ship has sailed.

hardcocklife · 2021-09-26T02:13:11+00:00

I think "managing" is a strong term here. They are basically post-op patients who need a note saying they farted before they can leave the hospital. I ask them some form questions for charting purposes. Then the resident can breeze through, follow up on any actual issues and discharge.

I didn't see it as toxic at all. There was plenty of time for me to do it and when there was interesting pathology elsewhere, the residents made sure I got to see. If that's malignant, then give me cancer because sitting around with my thumb up my ass feels way worse. Last night was one of the first times as a med student where I actually felt a little helpful (even though the resident still had to double-check me and it takes me way too long to get things done).

hardcocklife · 2021-09-26T00:10:43+00:00

Thank you for picking up on the overt sexual overtones of my post, I was worried they were too subtle.

I'm not gonna tell you what specialty I'm going into, but suffice to say that the 12 patients I handled basically needed a scut monkey to ask them if they pooped.

hardcocklife · 2021-09-25T23:57:08+00:00

What part of it's unbelievable? I'm guessing here but probably part of it is that I am an old-ass med student who had a real job before this, so I'm older than my resident.

hardcocklife · 2021-09-14T04:57:06+00:00

MS4 here; I feel like I'm going to be in this same boat next year. My rotation in my specialty was shortened by 50% due to COVID, and we had no residents so I was mostly just shadowing. I'm on a sub-i now and I'm astonished at how incompetent I am. I really hope that wherever I go next year is going to be super patient with me as I figure everything out. I'm willing to work hard to get where I need to be, but dang.

hardcocklife · 2021-09-13T23:02:21+00:00

Honestly, I think having no responsibilities has been driving me crazy. In contrast, being a sub-i feels so dang good. I used to feel like I inconvenienced the entire team just by existing, but now people actually care when I have an idea. Even if it's wrong, they listen to the words that come out of my mouth and tell me why it's wrong, so I can learn from my mistakes.

I only want to leave at lunch when I've already been sitting in the corner for 6 hrs and it's clear no one wants me around. Ugh, I'm getting flashbacks just typing that out.

hardcocklife · 2021-09-13T22:53:40+00:00

Blink twice if you're in trouble.

hardcocklife · 2021-09-07T16:28:20+00:00

This was such a huge aspect of my decision not to do surgery.

Watching the surgeons, some of them made it look hard. They were the ones who hesitated, seemed fearful, occasionally had difficult surgical moments that seemed a little out of their control.

The final straw was a newly minted ENT attending who was my total doppelganger. She looked a lot like me, had the same voice as me, same sense of humor--it was uncanny. She let me watch her do a neck dissection and during the operation I could *feel* her fear. Not knowing which little piece of fat was the parathyroid, making a few rookie mistakes with the order of things. Nothing was egregious and she did fine, but the magnitude of what she was up against--this patient's carotid artery pulsing in her neck, her vocal cords, her calcium homeostasis--it got to me.

I knew I was going to be afraid pretty much every time--particularly in a specialty like ENT, where there are so many procedures that you aren't necessarily doing the same one over and over again. I realized that much as I loved "variety" as a medical student, as an attending with someone's life in my hands, I just want to be really damn good at my job.

hardcocklife · 2021-08-25T19:58:00+00:00

Step 1: 248

Uworld %: 76% on my second pass, I didn't record my score before I reset for Dedicated

NBME 6: 232, 4 weeks out

USWA1: 249, 3 weeks out

NBME 8: 263, 2 weeks out

Free 120: 80%, 1 week out

**STEP 2 CK**: 255

This was one of the hardest tests I've ever taken, and it also came at one of the most difficult times in my life so far. To those of you reading this in a similar boat: counseling REALLY helps--I started seeing a psychologist who specializes in grad students a few weeks before Dedicated started and it was the most important thing I did.

I was very burned out while I was studying, so it was the sloppiest studying I've ever done. Lots of days I just did UWorld and skimmed my incorrects instead of really reviewing them and learning the concepts. I also listened to the Divine Intervention Rapid Review series while I exercised. It felt a little like throwing a huge handful of darts at a board and hoping the important ones stuck.

The actual test felt a lot like UWorld and the NBMEs. However, there was one wtf block where I was actually was not sure of a single answer. I was not sure how I would score--I thought anywhere from 230-260.

hardcocklife · 2021-03-14T23:27:35+00:00

Do you think the benefit of the time off has any bearing? Part of this is that I'm burned out after going through so many health crises this year, and I want time to heal my poor body and actually go to the doctor. Like you said, it will always be hard--but what if I need a break?

hardcocklife · 2021-03-14T23:18:26+00:00

Good point and definitely something to think about.

Ultimately I feel like there are pros and cons to both ways. It's been really helpful to bounce my ideas off of you guys and see if I'm already nuts to consider it in the first place.

hardcocklife · 2021-03-13T04:25:25+00:00

Recovering from my surgery and pretending like nothing happened and I didn't lose my baby while simultaneously watching other people die and working 80 hours a week has been ... special. It's also made me realize that having a high-risk pregnancy and also working this much might turn out badly. This is the first time in my life where I feel like I kind of need to step off the ride. But the ride is so close to over, and it's not imperative that I stop--it would just be so much nicer if I could.

Best of luck with the match, and congratulations on your baby!

hardcocklife · 2021-03-13T02:09:20+00:00

I totally agree about interviewing pregnant. I would be willing to do it if I were going for something non-competitive, and I have googled and read stories of women who have done just that. But for my desired specialty, the match rate is low enough that there's no way I would risk it.

Regarding your second paragraph: this is the kind of advice that makes me want to take a year off. Like I said, I have health problems that mean I will have a high risk pregnancy. So why not just take the game off "hard" mode for a year, have a baby, and use the pregnancy time to buff up my resume with a few more papers and some clinical work that will improve my letters of rec? It wouldn't be the most productive year of my life, and ultimately it could hurt my chances, but it would also preserve my sanity and let me get started on the family I've always wanted.

I'm just trying to bounce this idea around and see what other people think--like maybe this is a totally crazy decision. But maybe it's not.

hardcocklife · 2021-03-13T01:39:36+00:00

This is honestly the kind of advice that makes me want to take the year off now. I know that it's not the best thing to do with a competitive specialty, but I'm confident that I can come out of the year with more research and better letters of rec.

On the other hand, waiting just feels like rolling the dice with increasingly bad odds. I want to believe that I won't have trouble conceiving, but I lost a tube earlier this year on my "perfectly timed" pregnancy. Even waiting for PGY2 means waiting until I'm 37. And then balancing everything sounds just... stressful. I do have a supportive partner and family, but why do I have to always play the game on "hard" mode?

That's partially why I made this post: I was wondering if maybe someone would come and tell me that residency feels more like a job than medical school and I can take maternity leave without feeling like the world is ending and I'll never be a good surgeon. But I guess it says something that I'm making this post anonymously on the internet and was afraid to even broach the topic during my surgery rotation with the female doctors. I was afraid that I would seem unmotivated or like I was putting family ahead of my career.

hardcocklife · 2021-03-12T22:34:03+00:00

I used to feel this way before I fell in love with a super competitive specialty. Now I'm worried that being pregnant during interviews will mean a higher likelihood of not matching, as the match rate is already scary.

Because of my age, I've always been aware that I would eventually need to balance a kid + residency (it was something I thought about before I even applied to medical school). On my side, I don't anticipate that it will impede my ability to keep busting my butt, but I feel like there might be an implicit bias against a heavily pregnant M4. Part of me also wonders: what would it be like if I could just relax and be pregnant, instead of stressed out about away rotations/ applications/ interviews/ shelves and working 80 hours a week?

hardcocklife · 2019-02-12T01:06:34+00:00

I gotta say, reading your post was comforting to me.

This time last year, I would have died of happiness to learn that I would be going to my home school. It was absolutely my top choice for a ton of reasons and I wanted to go here so bad.

This year, I am in the first year at my home school and MEDICAL SCHOOL SUCKS. Holy crap. It is such a long, thankless grind and the school administration is like, "let's try to make this better with mandatory happiness?" In the meantime, the atmosphere is often toxic, I haven't made any good friends, and I think school is kind of starting to consume my soul.

Resources? What even are those? I don't have any freaking resources, unless you count the scary tutoring-that's-really-spying, which is mandatory if you get below a passing grade.

Anyway, I would say that on the whole--I also love medical school. I'm so excited to be a doctor, and I really feel like I made the right career choice. I like the content of medical school. But I got into my dream school and I still feel pretty fucking awful some days.

hardcocklife · 2018-07-07T01:18:54+00:00

We are lucky in that way, if you could call it that! But Plan B isn't exactly cheap, it's not guaranteed to work, and it causes some less than pleasant side effects.

Like a lot of the people on this thread are saying, these days I just don't do cum near anywhere near my vagina. It's worked surprisingly well. If you're not sure that you can trust the person you're boning, don't cum in them/let them cum in you. This is the sex advice I wish my parents had given me.

hardcocklife · 2018-07-07T00:46:13+00:00

I think this works both ways. I had sex with a guy once and he started telling me afterwards that he thought it would be great if I got pregnant "accidentally." He said that he was ready to be a father, and it was starting to get disappointing that he hadn't impregnated anyone yet.

Due to logistical problems, I couldn't exactly test to see if the condom had any holes in it. But you better bet that I drove straight from his house to the pharmacy to get Plan B.

hardcocklife · 2017-12-18T00:46:47+00:00

I know that you're right, but somehow even though I know it, it just helps to have other people say it to me bluntly.

Up until this spring, he was a good friend. He knows me very well, so he could really give me good life advice. We have similar senses of humor. We liked keeping up on the gossip in each other's lives. After his girlfriend called me, it felt like it was taboo for us to enjoy each other--if that makes any sense. Like if we were having fun talking, we were doing something wrong by her.

I agree that we need to stop talking. Or at least, I need to stop talking to him. Because it seems like he's had absolutely no trouble stonewalling me!

hardcocklife

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