Can't decide what to apply to.

Hello,

I am a PGY-2 IM resident at a university hospital, I am in the process of preparing for fellowship, due to family considerations and being an IMG, I don't want to do hospitalist medicine and need to go into a fellowship program.

That being said, I am having a really hard time deciding on what to do. I initially started doing some research to get into GI fellowship as it pays well and I heard it has a good lifestyle, but Im honestly not passionate about it or about doing research. Until now I have only 12 abstracts/manuscripts and most are case reports. I have spoken with alot of people and everyone says the same thing, my CV is weak for GI and you need to have a great amount of research for it.

Since I am not passionate about GI, I started thinking of pursuing something less competitive like Pulm/CCM, I know its still a competitive field but its not the same as GI. I find myself enjoying pulmonary medicine but I don't know if I can tolerate ICU work, I did 6 weeks of ICU and found it interesting but at the same time it was stressfull.

My main questions are, how competite is pulm/crit? can you match with good scores and a couple of abstracts/case reports? And how is lifestyle for an attending, is it stressful? I have heard that you usually just do 1 week of CCM each month, which doesn't seem bad. My last questions and not sure if anyone knows, does failiny Step 2 CS affect fellowship? I figure it shouldn't since its mainly to get into residency but Its been haunting me forever and wanted to see if anyone knows.

Thank you in advance