Help me decide when to get pregnant
I’m in my CA-3 year and trying to understand
how many days I can take off per the ABA & ACGME before having to extend/make up residency
how being pregnant or potentially being on maternity leave in between graduating and starting an attending job would affect my prospects of getting a job
Ideally (and I know these things cannot be timed perfectly) I would either want to deliver right at the end of residency or after graduating so that I don’t have to necessarily make up days (I really want to be done with training lol). We get 4 weeks of vacation so I could stack my vacations in the last month of residency and then extend my “maternity leave” into post graduation such that I would basically start an attending job later than my non-pregnant colleagues and not get paid maternity leave from my attending job (which is fine for us financially).
So the question becomes, by delaying starting an attending job, will this limit my job opportunities? And am I being delusional about the whole thing? Maybe this is the wrong decision. Maybe there’s an entirely different option that I’m not considering.
To answer the question of why not wait until you become an attending so that job opportunities are not an issue and you possibly get paid maternity leave: we feel that we’ve already delayed this longer than we wanted to and we think having time in between residency and attending hood would be good for me in more ways than one (my program is a tad malignant and it’s been rough at times).
Unfortunately, no one in my program (residents or Attendings), family, or friends have been pregnant during residency so I don’t have guidance. I would prefer not to discuss this with my PD for fear of being treated differently or pressured into making a decision that isn’t right for me bc all they care about is money and staffing. I’d rather make a decision and tell them how it’s going to be.