What’s in a name?

January 28, 2006 at 9:44 am | Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Ahh, done with neurosurgery. The problem with those two week surgical subspecialty rotations is that they’re not long enough for the coolness to wear off. You really have to be there for a month or longer to know whether you really are interested in the subject matter, and not just the idea of operating on someone’s brain. I think for me it’s a combination of the fact that I really love neuroscience, and I’m obviously a surgeon by personality. It just feels right.

My brother called me last night while I was on the way home from the hospital. He just got back from Philadelphia. He’s a corporate attorney specializing in intellectual property and contracts and, in a scary display of brinksmanship, just got himself promoted to Associate General Counsel for his company. So they sent him to some week-long seminar at Wharton, and apparently he had a great time. He was wiped out, though, so we didn’t talk much.

The guys staying at my place in New Orleans have decided to stay another month, which is a load off my mind. It really is a great location. And last week I ran into one of my classmates who took a year off and came back just in time for Katrina. She lost everything in the hurricane, and is on the verge of transferring because she has no place to live in July when the second years have to go back to New Orleans. I told her about my place and that I’d only be back for a couple of rotations next year, and that she was welcome to stay there the whole year if she wanted. What an awful time she must be having. It’s the least I can do, and anyway, I need someone to stay there and keep an eye on things. So she’d be doing me as much of a favor as I’d be doing her.

At Anderson this past week I spotted the chief resident from my trauma rotation, not once, but twice. I’m sure he saw me, but I didn’t say hello. For the life of me, I could not remember his name. Which is not at all an unusual thing for me–I still can’t remember the names of at least half my classmates when I see them. It’s almost pathologic. I felt bad about not saying hi, but then I realized that he hadn’t said hello to me either. So maybe he couldn’t remember my name either.

I wonder how many names I’ll remember a month later from this neurosurgery rotation.