On the last day of surgery (a teaching day), we had a lecture about the culture of surgery and the skills required to accept feedback and criticism from those around you.
It really struck a cord with me as my last three weeks of surgery were marred by my inability to respond appropriately on the second day when I had not completed the reading assigned to me. Besides the random facts of anatomy reviewed, the modest progress made on toward understanding more completely disease process and therapeutics, the largest and most important lesson I learned from surgery is that I must practice constant mindfulness in order to both give and accept evaluations in a constructive way.
This idea of a community where confrontation is acceptable and expected is quite possible, as I witnessed at Haverford. I have been working to make it more of a reality here in medical school through my work with the nascent honor board, but so far have not made much progress.
At the end of this morning's lecture, the presenter hit a brick wall in attempting to convince residents to be part of a culture change because they are afraid of retribution from their superiors. Ironically, any culture change in surgery will have to come from the top down. In the current culture, there is no way that a junior resident can call out a superior for making sexist jokes or practicing poor medicine and still expect to get a letter of recommendation upon which her future career depends.
The only part of surgery left to do is take the "shelf exam", a test which I am woefully unprepared for, mainly because it has so much medicine in it that I will experience much more through the rest of my rotations. But I had to have something first, so might as well get surgery out of the way.
Okay, back to doing practice questions...
