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After completing medical school, everybody has to choose an area to specialize in residency.
At my medical school, I was very interested in the general medical specialties of internal
medicine and pediatrics.
What I noted was that the pediatricians were working just as hard I felt they were just
as bright as the internist, but they were much happier about the patients. The internists
were somewhat upset sometimes because their patients had brought their conditions on themselves
by perhaps drinking too much, smoking too much, and in general not taking care of themselves,
whereas many of the children had done nothing to bring the condition onto themselves.
Further the kids once you did something small to intervene and make them feel better, they
got better very, very quickly. In my speciality of congenital heart disease, these kids bounced
back from surgery, and are walking down the halls in a week.
I am sure that if I had the surgery, I would be moaning for a month. As I went through
residency, the cardiologists were doing work that fascinated me.
The heart just made sense. It was electricity. It was plumbing. It just clicked in my brain,
and I really, really enjoyed it. So I pursued a fellowship in cardiology.
Within that fellowship, again the passion for arrhythmias and electricity caught my
eye, and I did additional training in that area, and now I deal in a very refined area
of just arrhythmias in children, and what I tell people is this is a luxury to be able
to work in this smaller area and focus all your efforts on such a narrow part of the
field.
The benefit is that I feel very comfortable in doing what I do. I also tell people that
being an expert allows me to know better than anybody else, what we do not know and what
we need to find out.