Sometimes I’m asked by medical students and anesthesiology residents what a typical work schedule looks like for me as a dual-trained adult cardiac anesthesiologist and CVICU intensivist working in academic medicine. Although my schedule has changed with growing administrative and leadership responsibilities, I feel like it’s a great balance between fixed clinical time, opportunities to moonlight, and time off to pursue my recreational hobbies (which are often still centered around medicine, 😆).
This is what my May 2026 work schedule looks like:
In my CV anesthesia practice, I might be working solo one day, providing sedation for a colonoscopy in a patient with a durable LVAD, and then working with a cardiac anesthesiology fellow the next day, doing a double lung transplant while I run the OR board. Some nights when I’m on call, I’ll be doing an aortic dissection repair or esophagectomy for Boerhaave’s syndrome with the resident on call. Other days, I might be supervising certified anesthesiologist assistants (CAAs) in the electrophysiology lab. I have a wide variety of cases I’m exposed to in the anesthesia world, but pretty much all of the patients have some “cardiac thing” in the context of other comorbidities – they’re on a mechanical circulatory support device, they have severe ventricular dysfunction or valvulopathies, they’re a patient in an ICU in the Heart and Vascular Institute (HVI), etc.
As a CVICU intensivist, I cover a 20-bed unit caring for patients pre and post-operatively. I see a mix of pathologies ranging from aortic dissections and thoracoabdominal aneurysms to infected/leaking endostents, endocarditis, esophageal perforation, severe peripheral arterial disease, and much more.
During night shifts, I cover the CVICU but also cross-cover the lung transplant service (orders, new admissions, etc.) Typically I stay in-house during my last day on CVICU service and knock out one of my night shifts since I already know the entire ICU by that point. 24 hours is rough, but it’s one day a month, so compared to my days as a trainee, I have nothing to complain about. 😂
I also moonlight a fair bit in our in-hospital organ donor care center (DCC), providing procedures (bronchoscopies, central lines, arterial lines, ultrasonography, etc.) as well as medical recommendations for donors after brain death (DBD). I’m also on-call to oversee donation after circulatory death (DCD) cases when I’m moonlighting in the DCC.
If I’m being honest, sometimes I work more on my days off and nonclinical days than on my actual clinical days in my roles as the medical director of the donor care unit, interim division chief of the anesthesia critical care division, and associate medical director of the Master of Science in Anesthesia program at UTHealth Houston. Coupled with giving lectures, online content creation, app development, and pursuing my tech interests, I stay busy! 😃
Drop me a comment below with questions!
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