When a woman becomes a surgeon, she doesn’t necessarily have to give up her femininity – but she often has to make sacrifices.

I enjoy nail polish, but that’s not the reason I switched specialties from neurosurgery to psychiatry. The upside is that I can now indulge myself and my nails.

At first, when I was still in residency, I would sometimes sit on and hide my nails when I was around someone who had a good a professional salon nail-do.  Now I do not much care, as I am more mature and more self-confident.  My nails are polished with some generic enamel from a discount store in a single color, and I apply the lacquer myself. If you inspect them at any random time, you will probably find them plenty chipped. If someone ever noticed — and critical women patients occasionally do — I remind them that those nails were attached to the hands that wrote the prescriptions, so they were good enough for now. The answers didn’t matter.  Mostly there is none.  Sometimes a woman would say, as this one did, “You are nice looking for a doctor, so I thought I should remind you…” “Feh,” I thought but did not say.  I refocused on the job at hand. Nails are more important to some other people.  Sometimes more important than health. Read more on Since When Is Sugar A Vitamin?…