i'm a non-medical person who has been with a soon-to-begin surgical resident (matching in march) for almost a year and a half.
i love her to death, and i think that things are going well with us in terms of time, etc, and currently we live in different states, separated by about 10 hours of driving.
i worry about her residency and how it will impact our lives quite a bit. surgery types tend to be very reassuring and insist that the lifestyle is good or at least doable. my thought on that is that this opinion comes from the segment of the population that not only was drawn to medicine but also the smaller subset that actually loves surgery, which has certain personality characteristics that tend to be common among many surgeons (hard-working to an extreme, type A personality, willing to sacrifice most personal life stuff for the "privilege" to do surgery), so their subjective view that surgery provides an adequate lifestyle must be taken with a grain of salt. satisfaction rates for general surgeons are lower than those for IM docs, but those in most surgical subspecialties report some of the highest job satisfaction rates of all medical careers. across the board, though, both medicine and surgery report not having enough time/wishing they had more personal/family time.
for my situation, i try to keep my anxiety at bay--i'll cross the bridge when i come to it. i trust that she is honest when she tells me without prompting or any show of concern on my part that she will switch specialties if she starts with surgery and it doesn't allow her the family life she wants. she and i have met surgeons who maintain the kind of family life involvement that we both want, though they are uber-rare, so it IS possible, though invariably those folks note that it is tough as hell. so we plan on giving it a shot, and i plan on staying with her unless i truly feel that she has abandoned her expressed priorities in her life in favor of becoming a surgery robot.
on a final note, i'm not some stay-at-home do-nothing who has no social life--i have about 10 amazingly-close friends, plus a bunch of others with whom i enjoy spending time, i work full-time at a law firm, and am in my final year of law school. at the same time, she can't guarantee that she'll match in michigan where i live, nor do i expect that she would try for that when so many amazing opportunities await her elsewhere. because of this, which potentially entails me needing to study for a state bar exam for which my education has NOT prepared me, and leaving my home state and family and friends just as my sister and two close friends are having/have had their first children, all to support her career, i expect that her priorities will include our future family as number one. sure, the pager comes first, duh, but a line must be drawn at some point between the "normal" lifestyle and the superman complex (where you feel like you should always be at work rather than clark kent, since when you take time off bad things happen to people and you aren't helping them). i hope we can pull it off...
i think it takes a person with a strong will, clear and strong priorities that are set at a point where the person is mature enough, and an amazing ability to strike a balance in your personal and medical life, and then it takes meeting another person with similar character. unfortunately my woman met me instead, so she gets a guy who gets needy and gets anxiety about things from time-to-time, but so far things have been good.
good luck to you in your chosen path.
--jason
