I am in the 3rd week of my surgery rotation (out of 4 weeks). Surgery is freakin' sweet! There are always so many surprises and you get to see the patient in so many different perspectives. Some include: anatomically, post anesthesia (which usually involves moaning and flailing), happy happy stage from removing what ever was causing them pain (and also a morphine drip doesn't hurt) and of course you see the sad side of their pre-surgery status. I love the skill involved that only comes from years of practice. In the med school classroom, the people who shine are those who read, comprehend and regurgitate the best. In the surgery room it's not just what you have read, but what skills you have developed through practice. I like that I get to work with my hands and I like that the scrub nurse can yell at the doctors about such things like obeying the rules of the sterile field. You don't see that much in the pure medicine disciplines where nurses are usually stepped on by the docs.
Yesterday I scrubbed in an atypical hernia case. This fella had a huge, grapefruit sized, bulge in his abdomen. It turned out to be strangulated small intestines that necrosed. It was dilated, green and oozed foul funk that you could smell outside the operating room. I didn't even want to eat dinner later on in the evening because I could still smell that rancid odor! We had to take out the badness and suture the two free ends of his bowel back together. The cool part is that we left the wound open and packed it with gauze to encourage healing from the inside out. If we closed it, he would just get septic and more badness could happen. I changed his dressing today and had to peel out the gauze from his open wound. Awesome. He didn't seem to mind since he said that he experienced much worse during his service in Vietnam and again, the morphine drip doesn't hurt.
Hope this was at least minutely amusing. Many more stories to tell...
