Surgery is over...

How about I'm posting twice in two weeks, I'd say that's pretty awesome of me. Yesterday was a pretty cool day. For starters it was my last day of clinic work on surgery, which translates into my last day of waking up at insane early hours (i.e 3:30ish) to be at the hospital at insanely early hours (i.e 4:15ish). I was writing one of my notes around 5 yesterday morning and some intern/resident/attending walked by me to get a chart and then stopped and said, you must be on surgery no one else is here at this awful hour in the morning. To which I replied I sure am but it's my last day so I'm pretty excited about that.

I was hoping to have no surgeries yesterday like I did Tuesday and Wednesday. Wednesday I went into work at 5 am wrote my notes, and was back home by 7 because we had no surgeries and my extremely nice intern told us to go study there was nothing else for us to do.

Yesterday though there was a surgery so I had to go in on it. I was not excited because it was a CABG (coronary artery bypass graft) and they take FOREVER, and from past student experiences you can't see anything and you just stand there for at least 6 hours. Not seeing anything is generally a problem for me because I'm a good 3/4 foot shorter than most of the surgeons and they tend to put the table at their level because...well they are doing the surgeries. But anyway, the Dr was great. They made sure I had a stool, I had a perfect view in the 2nd assist position. So I got to stitch up the hole in the leg where they harvested the saphenous vein. I held a beating heart, got to use the blower to blow the blood out of the coronary arteries so the surgeon could see, and cut strings after he sutured the vessels to the heart. The let me hold scissors in the chest cavity mere millimeters from the heart...so cool. Watching the heart beat and feeling it beat, also very cool. The surgeon was so nice too he let me ask question chatted with me about Mobile, UA, football, he sang part of the fight song and said his dad was a music major up there in the 30s and helped with some of the music for the fight song and other things. We chatted about my high school and the good ole Semmes area, so he basically talked to me more than the resident and told me I did well after the surgery. So cool surgery with a cool surgeon was a great last day for my clinical surgery experience.

Today we had our oral test (as in spoken for some of you lol). We sat in a room, well hallway because the power was off in the office building so we were not allowed to go up the stairs. However our course director who is one of the most eccentric amazing people in the world that will make you smile no matter what day you are having because he is so out there yet so brilliant did sneak past the security guard and up to his 7th floor office to get our case stems for the exam; he's just that bad a. So the exam was one of us with one of the attendings given a stem like 65 yo female with abdominal pain for 3 days...and go. So we had to go through what all we would do and they would respond with good or now their BP is 80/30 instead of 110/70 woops. I think I did fine, even though I did have one patient code because I put in IVs before securing an airway, BUT in my defense I did say put in two large bore IVs WHILE someone else is but got cut off with patient is coding on the table what did you miss? After that she said I did well and it was my second trauma one, the first one I did fine on and I killed the acute abdomen stem so yay. Not that any of the trauma cases are realistic in the sense that they are for what one person would do but in the trauma room there are a bajillion people running around doing stuff all at once...a total adrenaline rush.

After the test I hung around a bit and then headed to the mall to buy some VS stuff for Heather's lingerie shower tonight, I thought I was going to be good and not spend a lot, but that didn't happen because I had to buy me some stuff too.

This weekend I am off, and then off next week except for a test Wed at 9 and Fri at 9 so I'm extremely pumped about catching up on sleep. In Dad news, he seems to be feeling better and has an appointment with the neurologist soon so hopefully he'll get some better news.

That's pretty much it for now I guess. Happy Friday everyone!