Surgery: My Passion In Surgery

Surgery is my passion. This wasn't a sudden realization; many events throughout my life have slowly paved the way towards surgery as a future career for me.

My first experience in a hospital where I witnessed a surgeon work was when I was only 10. We were returning from a dinner party and our car was caught in gunfire between two gangs. No one got shot but the windows broke and shards of broken glass fell on me. In the ER, a surgeon sutured my cuts with such finesse that there is hardly a scar visible today. The way the surgeon handled the situation and kept me calm, still amazes me. Later in high school, I volunteered at the same hospital and requested one of the surgeons to let me observe a cardiothoracic surgery. I was in awe of the environment:

I started by observing in the ER and eventually began assisting in surgeries. Our hospital received a large volume of trauma patients – road traffic accidents, gunshot/stab wounds and even blast injuries. I really appreciated how fast a surgery could improve the patient’s condition, sometimes just over minutes in the OR. It was a great feeling operating on patients restoring their anatomy back to a functioning state, watching them leave on foot; a feeling that cannot be explained in words alone. It often made me wonder about the ability of the human body to endure such levels of damage and still be repairable. The surgeon’s direct role in patient care, face to face with the pathology is also something that has brought me closer to this

My electives in trauma & emergency surgery, orthopedics and plastic surgery in the United States, allowed me to look at trauma from three different perspectives. As a career choice I picked general surgery, because it offers a wide variety of cases and many fields to further my training. While I lean more towards trauma and burns and would like to pursue related research, I eagerly await working in various sub-specialties the general surgery residency has to offer. I am hoping to train in a productive and supportive environment under the mentorship of highly qualified academic surgeons, improving upon my clinical, surgical and research