Eventually (after residency) part time work can be done. Physicians who went this route told me it is much better to do days on/off instead of 1/2 days- you never get done with the morning work and can never leave when you theoretically are off the clock.
If medicine, or any other field, is your passion you enjoy spending a lot of time doing it. If you are doing something for the money, prestige, outside work lifestyle but lack passion for your work it becomes just a job.
MALE physicians get all that respect et al as in post #98 but too often women who are physicians are not given due credit by many who think, despite being told, they are not really doctors. Too often women have the burden of supposedly being first and foremost being wives and mothers while males are supposed to consider their career first and family second. Irksome double standard that is less now but still there.
Wis, thanks for the insight, especially regarding the differences in the way men and women doctors are viewed.
I don’t see that at all, wis75.
As for the child care issue - we had a live-in nanny. It was actually cheaper than if we had schlepped twins to daycare, and it’s cheaper to hire someone live-in than come-and-go anyway (as part of the compensation is room and board). It wasn’t some insurmountable thing. It was an easy solution, so there’s no need to act as though it’s complicated - plenty of dual-doctor or doctor-professional households do this. Heck, lots of SAHMs in my area have this and they are running to tennis and Pilates, not the operating room.
She’s part of our family - think Alice in the Brady Bunch. We just nursed her through brain tumor surgery and she’s still living with us because our house is her house as far as we are concerned. She does light housework to feel useful and that’s fine with us. She had loyalty to us and we have loyalty to her.
“She can pick a specialty that is more 9-5 and work as a salaried employee rather than a partner. She can avoid surgery if she doesn’t want to get up at 4 AM. She should avoid OB and all super specialties.”
A male friend of mine has a wife who is an OB at a public hospital (possibly the same one as Hanna’s sister??). She is a hospitalist and she has great work life balance because she has work shifts scheduled far in advance and when she is off, she is off. It’s the dinosaur solo practice folks like my H who don’t have the balance, who get the middle of the night phone calls and deliveries.