Wow, I was a prick. Still am, to a certain extent (I'm going into surgery, after all), but hopefully a more self-aware prick.
Anyway, life, medical school, etc. got in the way and I had never really updated this thing except for occasional (now since deleted) posts on a few patient interactions (HIPAA-ized, of course) and other sundries. Recently I put a few posts up in a fit of half-drunk misery that was just an outlet for a particularly emotionally draining few weeks. Regardless, it wasn't exactly what you would call a coherent narrative befitting a blog. It had still languished really until several days ago until I finally realized what this needs to be about (and not just a vanity project).
You see, the thing is, I'm gay and entering surgery. Now, I'll of course follow this up with "being gay doesn't define me, it's only a part of who I am, blah blah, bullshit platitudes." All true, but in many ways, being a gay man in medicine - and even more, being a gay surgeon - is very different from most other fields.
Surgery is, of course, old school. I am old school in many ways (duty hours are an abomination, the only problem with q2 call is you only get to admit half the patients, etc. etc.), but it's also old school to an occasionally troubling extent, especially vis-à-vis social issues. Indeed, from the ACS' Little Red Book:
Stereotypes abound about personality traits thought to be characteristic of a surgeon. Consensus is that one should be male, athletic, anal-compulsive, addicted to locker-room humor, possessed of a vocabulary of single syllables, have the endurance of a marathon runner, and maintain a political, social, and sexual orientation somewhere to the right of Atilla the Hun.While I think that's generally hilarious and I fit nearly all of it (I don't do so well come that last clause) I think that makes it pretty obvious that being gay in surgery is rather different than being gay in, say, a SF tech firm. Hell, a quick Google search for "gay surgeon" isn't exactly flattering or helpful. Result #1 is Ben Carson comparing gay marriage advocates to pedophiles and practitioners of bestiality. It continues with a NYTimes article about medicine discouraging gay doctors, a story about an openly gay surgeon getting stabbed to death in his home. Then there is something about gay men getting plastic surgery, and several physicians named Dr. Gay.
Seeing that really made me think that there can (and should be) more voices online in the other direction. Look, I get that there is probably some substantial self selection among gays away from surgery, but if you figure even 2% of 1,100 PGY-1 GS spots per year it's obvious I'm (we're) not alone, no matter how much it might seem like it at times.
Obviously, this blog won't (and shouldn't) be entirely about my being gay. Gay surgeons are like onions, they have layers (sorry) and that's just one of many. Probably the majority of my posts will be about other things, like my deep desire to take every Da Vinci surgical robot to the roof of the hospital and throw them off, then light the broken carcass on fire. But I would hope that this eventually would become a place for me to share in my experiences and hopefully get some sort of meaningful dialogue going.
So get ready for a stream of (heavily parenthetical) ramblings about surgery, medicine in general, and my (supposedly extant) other interests like wine and competitive cycling.
