Struggling with Residency Indecision
Mostly posting this to see if I’m being over the top or if this is a standard experience.
My husband just started MS3, and is doing his surgery rotation currently.
He had a nontraditional path to medicine and we are prob 5/6 years older than the average couple in Med School. I’ve had some big reservations about him starting this career path- just thinking about how it puts our lives on hold financially/means we spend less quality time together/negatively impacts my career, etc (everyone here knows what I mean).
A big way he’s made this feel better for me is consistently reassuring me he’s not interested in doing a 90hr a week residency or pursuing a field with notoriously bad work/life balance. He’s been set on EM for the past 16months ish, and he always cites that it’s the low number of shifts/hours worked compared to other fields.
I’ve recently been feeling good about this- I’m working two jobs currently to get an extra certification in my field to prepare for our eventual relocation for residency, which is hard, but I’ve been embracing the busy time in our lives. We’ve even been planning on trying for a baby this summer.
So last weekend he makes a comment very offhandedly about where he’d need to apply for residency if he chooses to do gen surgery. He said at first it wasn’t something he really wanted to do, just a thought he had, but as the week’s gone on he’s continuing to bring it up. It’s made me upset consistently when he talks about it, because I feel like his priority is finding the coolest and most fun job in medicine, not thinking about what would be conducive to family life. Ego is also an issue here I feel.
How did other people cope with the up and down of not knowing what your spouse would choose for residency??