Surgery

In vet school, heaven forbid anyone ever "know" what they want to do when they graduate- all anyone ever tells you is how you're going to change your mind. Well, I'll be honest with you, I have changed my mind a lot since I became genuinely interested in vet med (and by that I mean not a three year old girl who loved ponies) but ever since I worked as a laboratory animal technician at my undergraduate campus, I've decided I want to pursue lab animal. This past semester I gained more interested in public health, as well, but overall, I'm taking steps to enter the field of lab animal medicine. As committed as I am to LAM, I think almost all veterinary fields are ones that I could see myself being relatively content in.

All except surgery.

I'm not squeamish: I have no aversion to blood or guts. I have no problem with things that bleed or ooze or smell bad. I understand the importance of surgery and I acknowledge that surgeons are probably some of the most intelligent and skilled professionals in all of vet med. They have that something about them that is borderline arrogant (sometimes way past borderline) and yet gives you total confidence in their knowledge and ability to dive into your animal's body and fix something. I just have absolutely zero interest in being that person.

I don't want to scrub my hands and forearms raw for ten minutes, wrestle with the seemingly endless acoutrements of a surgeon's uniform, worry about what (or who) the hell I can or cannot touch. I don't want a patient's life to ride on whether or not I remembered to flip a little switch or ligate a certain vessel or turn fifty different dials the right way the first time. I don't want to have to remember my anatomy in exquisite detail, most of all. I just...don't want anything to do with surgery. Today's principles of surgery lab reminded me of that, even though I did have a good time. And next year I'll have to do some surgery and I'll man-up and get it done; I might even have to do some surgery as a lab animal vet. But specialize in operating all of the time? No thank you.