Month: September 2021
It Takes a Village
By: Ana Sofia Ore, MD MPH My journey away from home started before residency, when I moved to Boston to start my research training. I had fears of how welcoming the city would be to a hispanic woman starting to immerse into surgical research and training. I was fortunate to then match for residency here. It’s been five years since I moved to Boston, and it truly feels like home. But what makes it home? The answer is simple. The community I have here. When I think of #HispanicHeritageMonth, that’s the first thing that comes to my mind. I think of the community that I am now a part of and the importance of having that in my personal and professional life. A major part of this community are my co-residents. I feel incredibly blessed having peers that understand me, in some cases have similar backgrounds as me, share my...
How summer schools can fill the gap in Global Surgery knowledge of medical students and surgeons
By Gabriela Azevedo Sansoni Global Surgery is a hot topic, but is it often part of formal curricula for medical students and surgical trainees? A lot of papers have been published calling attention to gaps in education about Global Surgery, and more generally, Global Health, in medical education. In theory it would be possible to squeeze in another mandatory course and add a few more hours of lectures and seminars for the already busy students and residents. But would it be efficient? I, of course, don't have this answer. I do think, however, that Global Surgery is an important yet not-often-mentioned topic, particularly compared with other surgical specialities. Global Surgery education should guide and capacitate surgeons (and nurses, anesthesiologists, OR assistants, etc) to work in different settings with varying levels of resources. I am privileged, in a certain way, for having personal and educational experiences in low and high resource...
It’s a vast wonderful world: National Hispanic Heritage Month Begins
By Chantal Reyna, MD It is that time of year… National Hispanic Heritage Month!!! From September 15th to October 15th, it is time to recognize the Hispanic and Latinx communities. https://www.hispanicheritagemonth.gov/ highlights the celebration of the Hispanic and Latin cultures and provides a list of activities throughout the month. AWS is supporting this month by working with the Latino Surgical Society and creating a Sunday Blog Series dedicated to National Hispanic Heritage Month, written by Hispanic/Latina AWS members. As awareness of diversity increases and research aims at health disparities, some questions arise regarding Hispanic vs Latin terminology. Previously, these terms have been used interchangeably in both vernacular and research language starting in the 1970s as a general catch all phrase. I recently recognized this while working on a health disparities talk and noticed that some papers used Hispanic and some used Latina, but did not define the differences if any....
The Rising Force of Female Neurosurgeons
by Alex Miner Two years ago, on my first day of medical school, I was touring the hospital with a group of classmates when our tour guide asked us if we knew which specialties we were interested in yet. I had just finished four years of neuro-oncology research after college and had fallen in love with neuroscience and neurosurgery about a decade before that; for a brand-new medical student, I had an unusually clear picture of what I hoped my future as a surgeon-scientist would look like. I had been asked this question before, and had received enough incredulous reactions about how the training for neurosurgery was too long, too hard, or too unsuited to starting a family, that I had learned to modulate my response. Instilling some amount of ambivalence into my answer seemed to make people more comfortable, less intimidated, and less likely to question my decision. However,...
How was your day?
By Alyssa Brown How was your day? This is always such a loaded question. It also probably explains why I don’t call my family and non-medical friends as much while I’m on the trauma ICU rotation. I want to tell them everything I saw that day, but I also don’t. I know they probably don’t want to hear it—the gruesome details of: unhelmeted motorcycle accidents, stabbings, shootings, and car accidents. The patient list keeps stacking up as we move through the 24 hour shift, and the pager keeps ringing. As a patient is discharged from the ICU, another gets admitted and takes their place. They ask me how my call was - I usually reply “busy” and keep it at that. They don’t need to know I watched a septic patient code twice, a gunshot victim come in dead on arrival, or about the knife wound that wouldn’t stop bleeding....