More actual medical stuff

So in response to my Mom’s sarcasm, I thought I’d better write about things that prove I have actually set foot in the hospital.

Mornings start at 7:30 when the staff go to a small ‘devotions’ meeting. Then it’s general ward rounds, and sometimes they do maternity and paediatric rounds. Then we students normally do the ‘baby checks’ on all the newborns – checking that they have the right numbers of fingers and toes and all the bits in the right places.

After that, we tend to go to the operating theatres – mostly wound dressings, but the occasional appendicectomy. Otherwise, there’s outpatients which could technically be anything, but often isn’t much at all. It’s a good place to practice examinations though. However, the doctors appear to clock off (or at least most of them do) at around 2pm so we often have the afternoons to ourselves if they don't have any operations.

Today, I got to assist in a hysterectomy which was pretty good. However, I thought the whole ‘lack of general anaesthesia’ thing would be a bit more interesting. They did it all under spinal (so she was numb from the chest down) and it was all pretty standard apart from that. She did start to feel a bit of pain towards the end though, and I was a bit annoyed at the amount of time it took to get her some pethidine. She seemed pretty calm though and barely complained.

It seems that they were all expecting me to faint during the op – 3 separate nurses came up to me and said ‘you’re really strong – most medical students faint!’ Apparently the boys do too.

So that was my day today – they’ve let us get a bit more involved this week so hopefully that continues.

See mom!