I was the main assistant in surgery today
We removed a kid’s pre-auricular skin tag and fixed another kid’s umblilical hernia. The first kid was so cute, he was only one year old and so tiny and blonde and kinda looked a bit like a more well behaved version of my cousin (possibly because he was unconscious). The second kid had buzz lightyear pyjamas on, which we were all very impressed with and a tiny bit jealous of. 20 year old girls are allowed to be jealous of a 4 year old boys pyjamas, right?
In the report at the end it was like Surgeon’s surname/My surname. YEAH! I’m now officially qualified to hold clips and dab at blood and snip suturing thread and look a bit gormless while I pretend to understand what the surgeon is doing. Huzzah.
Day in the life of a med student (on surgical rotation)
7.00am - wake up. Decide it’s too early to get up and fall asleep again.
7.20am - get up. Eat, get dressed, etc.
8.05am - meet clinical partner outside flats and head over to main hospital.
8.10am - arrive at admissions ward. Be informed that patient is an inpatient and can be found on fifth floor.
8.15am - arrive on fifth floor. Chat to very nice 80 year old male scheduled for a carotid endarterectomy.
8.30am - porters arrive to take him to theatre. Head for ICU/HDU to try and find yesterday’s patient.
8.32am - realise we don’t know where HDU/ICU is.
8.40am - spontaneously end up outside ICU with no knowledge of how we got there.
8.41am - go and chat to yesterday’s patient.
8.50am - her consultant shows up to see how she’s doing. He then teaches us a bit about HDU obs charts and how to analyse an ABG (which we already knew how to do but hey ho).
9.05am - head up to theatres and put scrubs on.
9.15am - get quizzed on carotid endarterectomies and the anatomy of the blood vessels to the brain. Two other med students from our rival med school show up and want to help out too.
9.30am - it’s T’s turn to scrub in. After scrubbing he realises he hasn’t put a mask on (rookie error) so I have to try and do it for him. It’s very hard to put a mask on someone else, I think I almost made his nose fall off.
9.40am - T finally finishes scrubbing and we get to go watch the surgery. I spend most of it stood on a stool to try and see what’s going on. It’s really cool! I have to adjust T’s mask about four times, and scratch his nose once. Baad. Other med students keep nicking my stool.
12.20pm (ish) - surgery is pretty much finished. T gets to help suture, which I’m uber jealous of.
12.30pm - head back to accommodation to get fooooood. Watch Modern Family because all I have to do with my time is watch TV.
1.45pm - head off to clinic. Realise we don’t know where clinic is.
1.55pm - arrive at possible location for clinic. Nurse directs us to correct location.
2.25pm - consultant finally shows up. There’s only room for one student at the clinic so T goes off to try and find case studies.
2.30pm - See the following patients:
- Man with teeny tiny inguinal hernia
- Young lad (probably about 23) who had his appendix out last year. On biopsy it was discovered that he had a tumour (neoplastic) in the appendix, and as it perforated during the appendicitis they’re a bit concerned about spread so he’s getting heaps of follow up. Really bad luck.
- Man presenting with PR bleeding, changes in stools, tiredness and massive weight loss. He got a 2 week wait sticker on his referrals (meaning suspected cancer).
- Paraplegic lady with changes in stools. She needed a PR so there was lots of confusion with hoists and whatnot.
- A lumbar hernia! Ever heard of one of them? They’re really rare, she’s possibly the only lumbar hernia I’m ever going to see.
- Lady with suspected cholecystitis, but with pain completely out of proportion to normal presentations. She was offered an inpatient bed to try and control her pain, but there was a 9 hour wait in A&E and she really wanted to go home. I felt so bad for her, there really wasn’t anything we could do - she was already on the strongest thing we could prescribe.
- Man with recent onset iron deficiency anaemia. He was a bit of a dude, really obese with a greasy ponytail and leather jacket, funky hat and carved walking stick.
5.30pm - after final patient me and the other med student (the reason T couldn’t stay at the clinic, and who didn’t show up until 4) walked back to the accommodation.
5.35pm - arrive back. Procrastinate.
6.00pm - decide to go and make some dinner. It’s good, had a satay sauce stir fry (with fake meat, mushrooms and leek) with rice. 3xnurses in flat are trying to cook their unhealthy food at the same time, so it’s a bit of a squeeze in the kitchen.
6.20pm - finish cooking. Eat. Procrastinate. Watch more Modern Family. Lament lack of TV.
7.30pm - shower
8.00pm - head to flat next door to play cards. Do very badly at all games.
9.30pm - return to my flat. Procrastinate some more. Try to find somewhere to stream season 3 of spooks. Fail. I suck at streaming.
10.00pm - decide to write this as a way to put off learning about the gall bladder.
My first day of big school.
Here is what I did today:
- Had induction. It didn’t take very long.
- We then had a massive break in which we played an incredibly tense game of monopoly (that has yet to conclude)
- Met with the module lead who appears to be one of the nicest men to walk this Earth. Literally, he said things like “if anyone’s mean to you, let me know and I’ll sort them out”, “your happiness is our main concern”, “if you’re ever stuck after a night out and can’t get home ring me. I don’t care if it’s 11 o clock” and so on.
- Went on a little tour of the hospital
- Got deposited on a ward and went to watch a laparoscopic cholecytectomy and a laparoscopic inguinal hernia repair with mesh. Look at me throwing out all the big words! Yeah!
- Had to answer the surgeon’s phone while he was operating. This was difficult as I didn’t know how to pronounce his name (still don’t, actually). Cue weird conversation:
ME: Hello, he’s doing a lapo- er- laparoscopy
PHONE: *garble*
ME: …huh?
PHONE: *laughs* what theatre are you in?
ME: Five. [at last, a question I can answer!]
PHONE: Okay *hangs up*
ME: bye?
SURGEON: Who was it?
ME: *has already forgotten name* Oh, um, I’ll look. *spends five minutes trying to find the “phone” button on his iPhone, looking like a doofus*
- The guy on the phone, who appears to be the surgeon’s mate, showed up a few minutes later. It was pretty cool, he explained some stuff to us about hernia repairs and different things we should look up and know about.
- I got to poke a gallbladder that had been removed and try and find the stones in it. There weren’t very many and were all kind of small, so we were wondering why if had needed taking out in the first place. At least with the gallbladder surgery I could get what was going on, you know we could see liver and intestines and the bit they were chopping off was the gallbladder. With the inguinal hernia it was just a mess of peritoneum and fat and vessels and shit going everywhere and it didn’t look anything like anything I’d seen in a textbook. I guessed that the top of the screen was the anterior abdominal wall, which it was, and that was about it.
Haven’t really got any funny stories today as I didn’t get to speak to any patients (who let’s be honest are the usual source of amusing stories in the medical world), but I’m sure there will be more coming, especially as tomorrow is all about KIDS and AUDITS. Okay, audit probably won’t be very fun, but they provide lunch so who am I to complain?
