It has certainly been a while since I decided to write something up from the medical side, but hardly anyone reads these posts anyways. So, as far as I'm concerned, I can say anything I want. (I'm 100% sure that I'm tempting fate and you know what? I don't care.)
There are a lot of reasons that I picked radiology as a medical specialty, but to fully understand everything that went into that decision, I'm going to have to start at the beginning: on the eve of my glorious birth. I'm just kidding. I wouldn't do that to you. OB/GYN is gross.
When I was a child, me and my parents always kind of knew that I was a jack of all trades and that my talents were in the arts, learning, and caring for others. I won small awards for my art and poetry throughout middle and high school. This is a tabletop mosaic I made with the eye of Re. Maybe if I had been part of a more privileged family, my artistic side may have been fostered more. That was not the case. But I am grateful because, real talk, I probably would have wound up as a starving artist.
In high school, I made a tenuous decision to pursue academics over art. College was expected and after a miserable year at Case Western questioning my life path, medicine kind of fell out as the right thing to do. I transferred closer to home and had a pretty good study/life balance throughout my undergraduate education.
I would be lying if I said that I didn't have an idealized view of medicine when I started. I dreamed of making a difference and helping to save lives. When I first got accepted to medical school, I wanted to go into family medicine. I actually laugh now when I tell medical students that, but it's true. I really think that primary care doctors do more for patients and are the most underappreciated physicians you will find.
So, you may be wondering what happened. Well, here's the problem: primary care doctors do more for patients and are the most underappreciated physicians you will find. Understand that in the current healthcare climate, many of my primary care colleagues were expected to continue seeing patients regardless of if they became sick. They were, by and large, not tested for COVID. And despite the fact that they are the gatekeepers to the rest of medicine, they routinely have to jump through hoops just to get basic lab tests and medicine covered by insurance.
I saw this as I matriculated through medical school. It's built into the fiber of the medical community like an insidious parasite, slowly choking off the viable, good parts of the job. At least, that's how it felt to me. I know that there are people who do not feel this way. But I was completely demoralized by this realization. I didn't want to participate in a system that I felt was essentially playing business games with people's lives. It made me feel dirty. The thing is, there's not a whole lot you can do to extricate yourself from that situation when you're $210K (now closer to $300K) in the hole. I mean, what job are you going to get, other than the one you're pursuing, that will pay you enough money to clear that amount of debt? And the worst part was that I felt that I really should have known better. All of my art teachers and even a psychiatrist I shadowed had warned me off this path, if I had only had the sense to read between the lines.
So that brings us up to my third year of medical school. I was depressed and felt trapped and needed to find a safe space before I imploded.
A lot of people have an "Aha!" moment in medicine. They deliver their first baby. They tie their first suture. They coordinate a patient's care. And in that moment, they light up from within and you know they've found "it". They've found the specialty that they want to devote their lives to; the career that will give their life meaning. I was starting to panic when that hadn't happened to me yet.
At my medical school, there were no 3rd year rotations in the ROAD specialties (radiology, ophthalmology, anesthesiology, and dermatology). Thank goodness I had a peer mentor. She wound up in anesthesia and said he had experienced the same feelings. Her advice was that I go to each of these departments, talk to the attending physicians, and see if I could shadow them.
Dermatology might have been a dream, but I didn't have the scores and the match rate was so low that it seemed literally impossible. So I started with radiology. And when I walked into the dark reading room, I felt something that I barely realized I had lost in the pursuit of a medical career. Oddly, I found peace.
The people felt kinder, the pace was a little slower, the vibes were a little less frantic, and there was much less noise. It felt like I could think. I started believing that I could make a difference again, even if it was a smaller way than I had envisioned. I'm not going to lie, the more favorable work hours were definitely a huge selling point.
I had the scores I needed, but as a black female I was kind of the antithesis of the usual choice. But, I knew that nothing else would fit. For anyone who is unaware, once you decide on your specialty, you have to spend thousands of dollars flying around the country to interview at 10-30+ programs, depending on how competitive the specialty is. After that, you rank your choices and the programs rank all of the people they interviewed. Then a computer algorithm takes this data from thousands of applicants and programs and spits out where everyone is going on MATCH day.
If you do not match, you have a second chance to "scramble/SOAP" into a program that did not fill all of its slots. This may mean even though you wanted to be a dermatologist, guess what? You get to spend at least a year in internal medicine or surgery instead. If you are unable to scramble, unless a miracle spot opens up or is made for you outside of this system, then despite being an MD, you may have to find a job in research or outside of medicine until the next match cycle. And you will have to pay thousands of dollars again and compete against the new class of graduates.
Thankfully, I matched on my first try but was not accepted to my first choices. I was pretty cut up about how the match worked out at the time, but I think everything probably worked out for the best.
3 years into my radiology residency, I know that I made the right choice. And, given all the damage I sustained getting here and all the
BS that I still have to deal with, I would do it again. I sometimes say that I'm not a "real" doctor. That feels true, but it's probably better to say that I'm not like other doctors. I can have a life outside of medicine. I have enough time with my patients to let my soft heart show, and I don't feel trapped anymore.
So if you feel that way, take a trip down to the reading room. We may fear the light, but we don't bite.