PGY1...Specialty regret?
I'm a PGY-1 anesthesia resident doing a medicine intern year, and I've been struggling with some pretty intense specialty regret.
I genuinely hate medicine. I hate covering the wards. I hate consult services. I dread the day-to-day work, and every week feels like I'm just trying to survive until the next rotation. I know medicine intern year isn't anesthesia, but it's still the path I chose, and it's making me question everything.
For context, I took a dedicated research year in plastic surgery between my third and fourth year of medical school. I was very involved in plastic surgery research and was originally planning to apply plastics. At the last minute, I switched into anesthesia.
My reasoning at the time seemed very logical. I was worried about the length of training, lifestyle, work-life balance, and whether I wanted to spend my entire 30s in residency and fellowship. I was also thinking about having a life outside of medicine.
The irony is...I don't really have some incredibly rich life outside of work that I'm trying to protect. I don't have kids. I'm single. I don't have particularly time-consuming hobbies. I keep wondering what exactly I was optimizing for.
Now I'm working a ton of hours anyway, except I'm doing work that I genuinely don't enjoy. In some ways, that feels worse than working long hours for something I found deeply meaningful.
Another thing I've realized is that I think I was mourning more than just a specialty. I was mourning the opportunity to become really good at a craft that felt unique and difficult. Plastic surgery felt like something I would have been incredibly proud of learning. I don't know if that's romanticizing it, but I can't shake the feeling.
The other complicating factor is that I don't even know if I'll love anesthesia. During my rotations, I never hated it. I also never had that "this is absolutely it" feeling. It was interesting enough, tolerable, and I liked aspects of it, but I wasn't passionate about it. I chose it because it seemed like the smarter life decision.
Now I keep wondering whether I confused "less stressful" with "more fulfilling."
I'm also aware that this could just be intern year depression talking. Everyone says medicine intern year is miserable regardless of your eventual specialty. Maybe if I were a plastics intern, I'd be equally exhausted and questioning my decisions for completely different reasons. Maybe this is just a classic case of "the grass is greener."
I'm 31 years old now, and part of what drove my decision was feeling like I was already "behind" and wanting to finish training sooner. Looking back, I wonder whether I gave too much weight to my age. Does another few years of training really matter over the course of a 30-year career? Or am I selectively forgetting all the reasons I decided against plastics in the first place?
I feel like I got all the way to the finish line of applying plastics and then turned around at the very end. Now I keep wondering if I gave up something that would have been a better fit because I was trying to optimize for a future that may not even exist.
Has anyone else gone through something similar? Especially people who switched away from a competitive surgical specialty—or people who seriously considered surgery and chose anesthesia instead.
Did the regret fade once you actually became an anesthesia resident? Or did you realize you had made the wrong choice?
I'm not looking for reassurance that I made the "right" decision. I genuinely want to hear from people who've been on either side of this.