Day in the Life of an Anesthesiologist

My name is Dr. Karen Francois. I'm a general anesthesiologist and I trained at New York Presbyterian Cornell. I did my anesthesia residency there and straight away I came to work as a generalist at Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla, New York. Good morning everyone. I'm getting up on my day. It's about 5.15 in the morning. I'm about to go get ready for work. Hubby's still sleeping. Lucky for him. So I'm getting ready for work. I woke up like this. Now I'm just gonna go check on the girls, make sure that they're okay. Still sleeping. Okay. So I'm heading into work this morning. It's about 10 minutes to 7. I have a day in the ambulatory surgery center, which is a newly constructed building for our hospital. So we do a lot of short procedures and the patients go home the same day. So I have to go in and kind of set up for the entire day at once so that I'm ready and keep things moving. So I'm heading in to the hospital. I'm getting ready to start my day. So now I'm ready to go. I'm heading from the main hospital to the ambulatory center. I just found out I'm gonna be doing a sedation case, which is just a little anesthesia to help patients get through procedures that normally wouldn't be tolerable without some type of anesthesia on board, but we don't give a lot. So this is just a sedation. It should be very, very fast. So I just found out my case is delayed. So that means it's time for you know what? So I just got the call. My patient arrived. I'm heading back up to the ORs. Just saw my patient, did my pre-op evaluation, and now I'm gonna go set up my procedure room. So I'm gonna go ahead and set up my anesthesia machine. Everything is off. I have to turn it on and check it and make sure everything is good. And I'm gonna get into doing that right now. First things first, always put on gloves. So I ended up in this room, which is kind of like the last time we had an interventional radiology day. This day we're just doing a sedation procedure for a biopsy. So we're in a room that actually is capable for interventional radiology, but we don't need all that today. We're just gonna use an ultrasound, which is the machine they have here. So with the da Vinci in the background, I'm gonna start setting up for my case. There's really no need to put on your mask before you set up for your case, but I just feel like it adds a little bit of effect. So I'm gonna do it. So I've been working at Westchester Medical Center as a general anesthesiologist for the past five years. I really love my job. I love what I do. I love seeing patients and taking care of them in their neediest times. And just being there, being a voice of reassurance and comfort for people who are going through surgery or having stressful, critical moments in their health. So to become an anesthesiologist, you need to do, aside from graduating undergrad, four years of medical school, as with every other doctor, four years of residency for anesthesia. So one of them is an intern year and the other four are your clinical anesthesia years where you're learning the basics of anesthesia and then advancing upon that. After that, a lot of times it's very suitable to go ahead and start practicing as an attending anesthesiologist. Though there are many paths that you can take with fellowship training, which usually is about one extra year. So you can do a fellowship in cardiac anesthesia, pediatric anesthesia. You can do also training in thoracic anesthesia, pain and regional anesthesia, and that's acute pain or chronic pain. So there's a couple of other things you can specialize in if that's what you're interested in and really broaden the types of anesthesia that you can provide. I find that being a doctor is a real privilege for me. Growing up, this is something I always wanted to do. So I'm really, really grateful for the opportunity to be living my dreams. I have many inside me. Their power comes from electricity. Oh, hello there. So it is now 10 p.m. and everyone is in bed and now I finally get to go to bed as well. So good night and I'll be doing this all again tomorrow.