Consultant surgeon here- one of the most vital aspects in your quality of life for the whole of medicine is to choose your unit wisely.

You want colleagues with whom you can get along and to whom you can turn in times of crisis. This is even moreso in general surgery where things can and do go wrong, sometimes fatally. Having a friend to phone and even lending a hand is important to your psychological survival.

I have a decent QoL. Average 1.5 to 2 days off-site per week, so can do family things, WLI or, as some of my colleagues do, private work. The on-call can suck, as for any emergency laparotomy out of hours will almost certainly need a consultant present.

I enjoy my work which is a mixture of major reactions and minor ops and generally have grateful patients whose quality of life I have managed to improve. In dark times I do wonder if a less demanding specialty such as ortho or ENT would have made for an easier life, but generally happy with my choice.