Tripler Army Medical Center

And that's when I decided to apply for psychiatry residency.

And I got accepted back at Tripler.

So I did this residency program in psychiatry at Tripler Medical Center.

I really got great training there.

And I was about to leave, and they had a child fellowship program that couldn't fill.

My name is Major Zachary Affrin.

I am the pediatric attending anesthesiologist at Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu, Hawaii.

My area of operations extends throughout Polynesia to include Hawaii, Tonga, Tuvalu, Kiribati, and then into Micronesia to include islands such as Palau, Guam, Tinian, Rota, and Saipan.

It's a wide area of operations, particularly in Pacific Command, which is the command that I fall under.

At no point in time was I ever pressed with Army needs during my fellowship time.

I was solely focused on being a fellow, and I really appreciated that time to develop into a clinical subspecialist leader.

Transitioning as a junior staff into a place like Tripler Army Medical Center, I'm still able to achieve a really good work-life balance.

in tandem with some of my new leadership responsibilities I'm finding even really junior in my career.

So the amount of, of authority and deference to me as a, somebody with a year of experience out of med school was just, you know...

I, I would joke that, you know, we could call the specialist at Tripler, but they wanted to know what Doc Austin thought.

You know, I, I think whatever the orthopod at Tripler thinks, right? But, uh, but it was a, a wonderful environment.

I had 15 IDCs, independent duty corpsman, working for me, and, um, formative.

Again, changes your perspective when you are providing primary care to people, making life and death decisions.