 So it's been six years now since I've been in residency and I've wanted to make this video for quite some time now. Being in radiology we don't really get the patient interaction that I've been craving and I've thought about changing specialties for some time now. I didn't want to be a quitter and just quit residency altogether. I kind of wanted to finish radiology first and then switch. Now radiology residency is almost completely done and I have to make my decision to switch specialties. No I'm just kidding. I would never leave radiology for any specialty. Period. Hands down. This is the best field of medicine and I wouldn't give it up for anything. Literally nothing. So sorry if you clicked on this title and you thought you'd see a different type of video. It was a little click baby so I apologize for that but I get a ton of questions asking me what I would have done if I wasn't in radiology. So I figured I would talk about the three specialties I was kind of indecisive about before ultimately choosing radiology so let's get in to specialty number one. All right so the very first specialty I thought I was going to do literally since like first shadowing slash going into med school I thought that I was going to be an anesthesiologist from day one going in med school and ultimately it obviously did not happen. The reason I wanted to do anesthesiology is because I've always been fascinated with putting patients to sleep and managing them and knowing everything about physiology and knowing how to basically balance a patient on the brink of death the whole time during operation or procedure. I thought it was just fascinating and there's so much physiology like I already said. It was very intriguing to me and I also had a very good professor during med school who happened to be a pediatric anesthesiologist and I always thought that was pretty cool as well. Being a pediatric anesthesiologist I didn't even know that was a thing until med school obviously. So the reason I ultimately decided against anesthesiology was not because my board scores weren't up to par or anything. The board scores I believe for anesthesiology are similar to that of radiology however there was one thing that kept me away and you may have seen my prior video on what grosses me out and that one thing is tracheal secretions. I just cannot do it. I'll never forget the first time I was doing a rotation in anesthesia. Went through the hole getting the meds together. I was so pumped for the case. Hung the IV. I started the IV as a med student like a big ol' like 15 gauge IV. It was huge. I was so pumped with myself. Then we got to the procedure. Intubated the patient. Awesome. Everything was going perfectly fine until the end during extubation and that's when you have to pull the ET tube out when the patient is waking up after surgery and you have to suction in like deep in the back of the throat. All the secretions as you pull the tube out because you don't want the patient choking on their secretions and aspirating. So at that point I was like I can't do this. I just can't do it because the sound like the I don't know. Still to this day when I have anesthesiologists that is in our procedure and they're waking up the patient post-extubation it still just kind of grosses me out. I mean it's not the end of the world but I just couldn't imagine doing that forever after every case. Everybody has that one thing in medicine secretions are that one thing for me to plus vomit. Now while we're on the same topic of vomit I can't tell you how many times I've had patients be nauseous after waking up from anesthesia and want to vomit after the procedure and for some reason they always turn towards me to vomit and I'm like please don't vomit on me. It's just a thing. A lot of people get nauseous from anesthesia and I've even seen patients just like vomit into their mask that they're wearing nowadays and just like explode their mask out with vomit and just go all over themselves. It's been over me a couple times too but the anesthesiologist will quickly get in there and suction out all the vomit as well and you know that's just I can't do all that. I can't do it. All right so I've mentioned before I almost actually went into this specialty. I've mentioned it on another one of the videos that I've done in the past and that specialty is urology. Now I don't know for some reason I had a fantastic experience on my urology rotation. It was honestly like the best rotation I could have ever asked for. So let me just set the scene here. So it was a small private practice with one urologist who saw a ton of different patients every single day. On the clinic days we would go around the office and it was a practice full of mostly you know 60-70 year old plus males. Everybody was so nice and just so happy to be with this urologist and the urologist was super nice by the way but it was just such a good environment and everybody was very jovial and nobody really took themselves too seriously. Even the older gentlemen patients they were just so funny and I noticed this a lot with the older male urology patients. They kind of just lose their modesty after a while and just kind of make jokes about everything and you know it's a coping mechanism for sure but it still just creates kind of a jovial fun environment and you really want to help these patients and make them better because what they're going through is tough and it's hard to talk about with a lot of people like it's it's a very private matter and you don't just want to go out and tell everybody what's going on but when you're in the doctor's office in the comfort of the doctor's office you can talk about it and open up about it and that's kind of what I liked. It was nice. They felt like they could trust you with everything that was going on and yeah I don't really know how to describe it but I really liked that and the next part I really liked about it was that there are a lot of different procedures in urology which I ended up liking a lot and the reason I ended up liking them a lot was because again they were fast like renal stance, renal stone extractions, ureteral stone, lithotripsy, cystoscopy. They were very quick procedures and had really good results which is exactly what I was looking for. I don't forget I shadowed this urologist for a long time in the OR. We did a whole bunch of cases together including like penile implants. You name it we did crazy crazy stuff but my favorite thing we did was the outpatient procedures. We would do a retrograde pylogram where you put a cystoscope into the urethra and then basically put a small catheter into the uriner and inject some contrast and take x-rays and obviously I didn't know at the time but I liked x-ray guided procedures and this was just that and ultimately the reason I didn't do it was it was just too much surgery for me. You still have to go through an entire surgical residency before you can be a urologist and I just didn't want to go through that because again I keep mentioning I don't want to do these four, five, six, seven, eight hour surgeries. Ultimately urology kind of led me down the path of IR because for one urologists and interventional radiologists work together on a billion different procedures involving the genitidio urinary system. Also because both of them have short x-ray guided procedures if I can have that short x-ray guided procedures without the surgery that comes with it then we have IR which I'm so happy I found it because that's exactly what I am doing as you all know. All right so this last specialty may come as a surprise to you all because the very first rotation I did in med school, my third year of med school, when we started rotations my very first time in the hospital was OBGYN and I loved this rotation so for that rotation I actually started in the hospital component or the OB obstetrics component of that rotation. You do two weeks essentially in the OR slash delivery room so then you do two weeks in the outpatient gynecology clinic so being in the hospital working on the OB floors was absolutely incredible. You got to know all the future moms, you got to meet their families, you got to talk to them all while they're trying to deliver and you really get to know the patients and you get to kind of walk them through this whole thing that is childbirth which is crazy and then you see the ups and downs of the delivery process and the anxiety and all this stuff and then eventually you deliver the baby and the patients or the mothers and the fathers are beside themselves with joy. It is the best thing ever to see when you pull a baby out of the womb and you hand it to the mom and dad it's crazy I mean there's no words to describe how awesome it is. It's just immediate joy and relief. It just takes over the whole room. It's very indescribable but it's amazing. So during that rotation I delivered about 20 or so babies and every single baby was the exact same result just overwhelming joy and I'll even put up a picture from my Instagram that one of the patients she was so happy with me delivering her baby even as a third-year med student under supervision of course that she made me take a picture with her baby because she was so excited. It's like old school way back in 2017 so the camera quality is a little terrible but nonetheless this is the first baby I've ever delivered in my entire life and besides that I enjoyed the clinic aspect of the gynecology clinic as well because you're just helping a ton of different patients and I always have enjoyed women's health which is why I love uterine fibroid embolization so much. I feel like some of these procedures have such great impact on women's lives and that's why I like this specialty as a whole. My other favorite part was there was actually a surgical component to this specialty as well. We would go to the OR a lot of times and do a cesarean section. We would do other operations as well. You know they weren't too long of procedures. They were kind of quick less than an hour surgeries and that was kind of what I was looking for which is why I ultimately chose IR. We do a lot of quick procedures under an hour sometimes hour and a half under two hours max for me and that's what I enjoy. I love those quick quick quick procedures get in get out patients doing better send them on their way and it's a win-win for everybody and PS more about beating the OR. I may do a video about all of the mistakes I made like as a med student learning medicine. I did make a mistake the very first time scrubbing into the OR but I'll save that for another time. All right so hope you all enjoyed this video I apologize for the click baby intro and the click baby title. I won't do it again I promise. As always leave a comment below and let me know if you see me doing any other specialty besides interventional radiology. Just knowing me over the last two years what kind of specialty would you picture me in. I'm curious to know your thoughts. So as always smash that like subscribe button follow my Instagram and Tiktok and I'll see you all on the next video.