I’m having a great time with transplant. Still haven’t really had much in the way of surgery to do, but with the whole weekend ahead, I’m hopeful that something will turn up.

Otherwise, this is great. Some surgery residents dislike transplant, because you have to do so much medical management (by definition, a transplant patient has lots of serious medical problems – diabetes, difficult-to-control hypertension, history/risk of strokes, cardiac problems, liver dysfunction), and because they regard this rotation as a waste of time, since so few residents actually consider transplant as a career. I don’t know what they’re complaining about. I don’t want to do transplant (it has to be the worst lifestyle outside of neurosurgery: completely unpredictable, with the potential to get swept into spending several days on end in the hospital at any time), but the rotation is good.

After the craziness of trauma, I feel like I have a normal life now, for perhaps the first (and likely only) time in residency. I can get out of the hospital in time to hit rush hour traffic. I’m not spending the entire weekend in the hospital. The laundry is getting done, the house is getting cleaned, I have time and energy to cook real food (I must have discovered the toughest cut of beef out there; got it because it was cheap; but it was still better than hospital food), and I have time to read both textbooks, science fiction, and a commentary on Samuel that’s been collecting dust for six months. Life is good.

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