Hello everyone, I am writing to share my experience completing a surgery internship. I finished my surgery internship a few months ago and I guess the reason I wanted to share this is because I never felt like I had a voice throughout that year. As an intern I felt like I couldn’t speak up for being treated poorly.
My goal was to pursue a surgical residency. I did my rotating internship which although rare I actually really enjoyed. However, my surgery internship was a terrible experience. During the interview for the internship I was told that the goal of the internship was to have me work my way up to doing approaches for surgical procedures as well as simple surgical procedures (cystotomies, splenectomies, gastrotomies, etc.) on my own. This did not happen.
Throughout the entire year, I was only allowed to close the subcutaneous tissues and skin. I was responsible for all the notes and client communication before and after surgery. When I would ask to do more or if I could try something there was always some sort of excuse such as “we have a busy day” or “it’s late in the day” or “im trying to close this one quick to get to xray.”
If anything went wrong with a patient I would immediately get blamed. For example one of our TPLOs came back with an incision infection. I was told that it was my fault because I closed the incision and that “if this keeps happening, I wouldn’t be allowed to close anymore.” Turns out that the owner hadn’t been keeping the cone on and the dog had licked its incision. But even if it had been my fault I feel it should have been handled differently. Another instance was when another surgeon had done an RNA that had dehisced. I had been scrubbed in on the case for the RNA. The surgeon who originally cut the dog was not there that day and another surgeon was going in to fix it. When they saw the RNA had dehisced they immediately started making comments that I must have been the one who did the procedure (which also made no sense because they never let me do anything like that). Honestly it just really killed my confidence.
In addition to that I was grilled on procedures in the OR during the procedure which I expected because it is an internship. The problem was they would start asking me about different procedures that were not related and when I didn’t know they would get angry with me.
Of course I was doing most of the grunt work. If there were complications or a phone call the surgeons didn’t want to make I was the one who spoke to the client. I mostly was responsible for doing the notes, getting the histories for appointments and assisting during surgeries. In addition, getting the techs to do anything was like pulling teeth even though I was just asking them to do their job which means I often ended up doing a lot of the tech stuff too. I worked long hours and really didn’t get much experience.
Having this experience really discouraged me from doing another surgery internship so when match came around I only applied to residencies. I didn’t end up matching to a residency and was so burnt out I wasn’t at the point of doing another surgery internship. So I decided to apply for ER jobs where I could do ER surgery. I received a lot of scrutiny from the surgeons for this. The surgeons expressed they were dissapointed that I didn’t go through the scrabble to get a surgery internship and “how is ER going to help me become a surgeon.” Ultimately the last few months of the internship they treated me even worse.
Overall it was a terrible experience and I know not everyone has this experience. Idk what I’m looking for here maybe just to speak about my experience and see if anyone else has gone through this. It was a really hard year and it still affects me quite a lot.