Futures

January 15, 2006 at 8:47 am | Posted in neurosurgery | Leave a comment

So the first half of my neurosurgery rotation is over. Now I go from the county hospital to MD Anderson, AKA the “mother ship”, for another 2 weeks. The residents call it the mother ship because it’s huge and has lots of money to throw around, and it’s also the home hospital of the department chairman. They used to call Methodist the mother ship, before the split with Baylor, and apparently it had the sweetest call rooms of any hospital at the medical center. At MDACC, the residents take home-call, so now Ben Taub is the only place where they take in-house call anymore. And the call rooms there suck. In fact, the students don’t even have one for neurosurgery.

I had a long talk with one of the attendings at Ben Taub, and he gave me a lot of good advice about places to go for away rotations, and how to approach the process in general. He seems very interested in helping women get into the field. Part of our discussion was about american society, and discordance between the role of women here versus in other, supposedly less egalitarian, societies, where there is in reality much less of a barrier to their ascendance to positions of real power and authority. He is from India, and went to a school that was originally intended solely to train women physicians. He said that it began to admit men in 1947, and is now one of the premier medical institutions in Asia. We talked about how women are often viewed just as commodities, and I mentioned my own experience with having gained and then lost quite a bit of weight, and how I had noticed a significant change in how I was treated by others as a result. I hadn’t changed at all, but suddenly I was rewarded for things that had been completely ignored before, and helped in ways that made a huge difference in my ability to succeed. So I remarked that now I always question any help or praise I receive from men–do they see me as a whole person, or do they just see a pretty face?

One thing is for sure, this attending is a very perceptive person.