I work in the medical field, but am not a doctor. Sometimes my coworkers and I talk about what kind of doctor we would be if we were doctors.
I’d be a pathologist. Very little, if any, patient contact, and no on-call times, if you have your own private practice, which, of course, I would. Most likely a dermatopathologist, as then you’re only dealing with skin, which I’m already used to, and pretty small specimens at that.
So, if you were a doctor, what kind would you be, and why?
There’s not immediate death, but you do have patients die from melanoma. And you do have to incise and drain big smelly infected sebaceous cysts. And there will be blood. Not a lot, and you usually have a cauterizing machine right there to stop it, but there is blood. In dermatology, that is.
Optometrist or opthamologist would be interesting, but it does seem like you have to get very, very, uncomfortably close to people. I feel like I get more intimate with my optometrist than I do with most people, and he doesn’t even buy me dinner first.
Forensic pathologist - it’s the job I’ve wanted for 20 years now. I have no interest in being a doctor though so I’m aiming to be an assistant instead.
Yes it is, and no they don’t.
The level of smelly will vary of course, with the age of the body and the reason it died. Someone who died of a heart attack and has been dead a day will certainly smell a lot less icky than someone who died of a bacterial infection and wasn’t found for a week in the height of summer.
I just had a discussion on facebook with my mom. She couldn’t understand how I could claim that dolls are creepy but say that the idea of autopsying dead people isn’t. I told her that dolls are evil and that autopsies are science. Science isn’t creepy, it’s cool.
In the UK at least, not all pathologists do post mortems. The majority of work for cellular pathologists is studying tissue samples e.g. biopsies to look for abnormal cells. They also look at organs & tissues removed during surgery. Some of that probably is smelly though.
If I had the right skills and personality (which I don’t) I would love to be an emergency or acute medicine physician. I like the idea of never knowing what’s coming and of having to start from scratch to work up a diagnosis and treatment.
Dr Cox from Scrubs. Arrogantly competant and and caring in a “I’m going to crush you because I want you to succeed and I don’t care about your feelings” sort of way.
Or “McDreamy” from Grey’s Anatomy, just because we have the same hair.