Day in the Life: Adult Neurosurgery

Braiiinnnnnnnsssss.

Sorry, couldn’t resist!

What does a vegetarian zombie eat?

Grainnnnnnnnnnnssss.

Okay, I’ll stop. You’ll have to excuse my sleep-deprived self.

I’m actually splitting this rotation into 2 “day in the life’s” because I spent 3 weeks on the adult service rotating between Team A, B, and C, and my last week in pediatric neurosurgery!

Day in the Life: Adult Neurosurgery

A Typical Day

I completed this rotation for interest vs. as a sub-internship. What would possess me to do a month of neurosurgery for fun, you ask?

1. My friend connected me with one of her former preceptors, who (small world!) used to volunteer at the same clinic I volunteered at! (Paul Hom Asian Clinic, represent!)
2. Getting to live at home (aka save on cost of living), and theoretically spend time with my family + friends.
3. Escaping the snowpcalypse!

I think everyone on the service thought I was crazy for willingly choosing to do a neurosurgery rotation, especially after they found out that I was not in fact trying to get into their program. (“…But why?” was the most frequent follow-up question. Apparently, no student has ever done this.)

I understand their disbelief, and am thoroughly convinced that neurosurgeons never sleep. That being said, this was the first hospital I’d been at where there was a surgery residency, so I can’t speak for other programs, but the ones I worked with were remarkably pleasant and well-adjusted, especially considering how little sleep they got.

Earning my street cred!

I’d wake up at 4:30 and scoot out the door by ~4:45 a.m. On Fridays, I’d leave the house by 4:15. We rounded at 6 every morning, and I’d finish my day there anywhere from 3-9 p.m.

Not a fan of my hours? Those were actually already drastically reduced! If I’d been on a sub-I, I would’ve likely gone in at 3 a.m. to pre-round on all the ICU patients. My preceptor told me he spent 160 hours/week at the hospital when he was doing his sub-I here. Yes, per week. (For reference, there are only 168 hours in a week.)

How do they do it? I’ll never know.

Depending on which team I was on, I’d either jump in on OR cases or work with whoever was on call to see patients and consults! I got to see a lot of extremely rare and unique pathology that I never thought I’d ever encounter.

Highlights in the OR included getting to help screwdriver someone’s skull back together, helping with a brain biopsy and tumor removals, and watching an awake craniotomy, aka where the patient was woken up during the surgery and asked to follow commands (e.g. reading from a magazine, wiggling his toes, answering questions, doing math problems).

I also got to work with my friend’s former preceptor for a day in clinic! (This was the same morning that I tripped and fell down the stairs, so I was limping around and he was rather concerned.) It was really cool getting to see such a different side of medicine, and he said I made his life a lot easier with the notes that I wrote for him (this is music to any med student’s ears :D ). He actually gave me the go-ahead to embrace senioritis since I wasn’t doing a sub-I, but I didn’t want to be a total slacker, so I tried to find a happy in-between!

Meals

The residents and preceptors were super nice and would sometimes offer to and/or buy me breakfast and lunch! I typically brought the day’s worth of meals with me though in an effort to save money!

Parking

…was $4.50/day. A week’s worth of that could potentially feed me for almost a month, so eff that!

I instead parked at a nearby shopping center every morning and walked 0.7-1 mile to get to the hospital. The first day, I wasn’t entirely sure of where I was going, so I followed the construction workers and ended up in the right place, haha.

This was taped onto the wall in the neurosurg lounge. The residents claim that they stab themselves with it at night when they’re on call to keep themselves going. In case it needs to be said, they’re totally joking.

Housing

I got to live at home for the first time since 2011! I lived about 40 minutes from the hospital (without traffic), so I commuted every day. Rush hour is something I am hoping to never have to deal with when I have a job someday. I didn’t really drive until I got to medical school, which was almost in the middle o’ nowhere, so traffic has never been something I had to deal with. ._.

On the plus side, Morgan Freeman has been added as a GPS voice on waze, so listening to him narrate my road conditions has been kinda awesome. My other alternative was sleeping in the car until rush hour was over. I fail at naps though, so what would’ve been 20 minutes turned into 2 hours and my mom thought I’d died on the road. ._.

Check out my other Day In The Life posts!