Salary
Average Salary: $233,150
Expected Lifetime Earnings: $7,628,000
You get thiiiiiiiis much. (You can't see, but our hands are really far apart.) Almost $400,000 for a starting salary, and almost $600,000 after just six years (source).
It's good money, but you have to remember that you won't be doing this for pay until you are in your early thirties, at which point you'll have a ton of med school debt to pay off before you get that Porsche. Plus, you're usually more or less an independent contractor, which means that if you get hurt, you're done. Think NFL-linebacker-with-a-broken-leg done. So you have to save your acorns and can't really live much of a flashy life until you've saved a truly large nut. Large enough to retire on.
If it was just the money you were after, a job on Wall Street would pay many times more than this one. Top surgeons make over a million bucks a year—which sounds great—except when compared to top Wall Street people or company founders or big company CEOs, who make ten to 100 times as much and don't have all the goopy life-or-death stuff to deal with.
If you remove this from a patient, you may want to call the Ghostbusters.
Also, lest you forget, the Wall Street guys can work productively well into their seventies. But a surgeon? Toast by sixty at the latest. So it is a short brilliant career you seek. One that's a nicely respected living, and the million bucks can buy you a whole lot of scalpels.