My Crazy Thoughts
my thoughts on various topics.

First I should say that I was at Shands-Jacksonville at 5:30 this morning so I've been up since 3:30 A.M.
Today I did my shadowing. It was pretty cool. I shadowed a 3rd year on surgery rotation. I thought it was a lot better than my first shadowing not that there was anything wrong with the first time, this was just more interesting. This 3rd year would probably make an excellent professor, and he said he has an academic rotation with us next year so we will get to see for sure. All of the med-students there on rotations thought he was awesome and doing a great job and had all these wonderful things to say about his, so it was cool to know that the info he was giving us was good, but since he is a 3rd year he actually has had classes up until last month when his rotations started so, I already knew that his classmates respected him. When we first got there we sat and looked up labs and meds for a little while, then we rounded. Which was cool because we got to see what med students do, and I got to see how the pharmacy student and pharmacist are integrated into the team. Then we walked around some more and then we changed into scrubs. Which was confusing for me. We were walking and he was explaining about scrubbing in and everything and then we get to these locker rooms and I was like, "what? Oh, we're doing this now?" And then we get into the locker room and Jen and I just look at each other like okay, what now? But there was a lady in there who helped us figure out how the scrubs were arranged and get into some. Jen's scrub top was way to big, and he pant legs had all these crazy pleats in them from folding so the legs of them were like accordian pleated. My top was okay, but the bottoms were too big, not way to big just not quite right, and they have no waist in them, even when you tie them so if they are a little loose and you are wearing them on your hips you have to keep an eye on them or your pants are going to fall down. I had to keep re-tying them. Then we went put on booties and a hair net thing and got a face sheild. And right after we put them on we found out that it was running late, so we walked around some in our hair net and booties and I felt like a lunch lady. Then they decided we should go look in on a breast resection. Which was cool. Even when I was thinking I would go to med school I knew that surgery probably wouldn't be my thing, but it was interesting to watch. We got in right at the end, when we were in there they removed this big piece of breast tissue, it was really more from the arm pit because they were doing some lymph nodes, but it was interested to see this big open cavity that they had made and how much room was in there. There wasn't much loose blood at all, I think it was probably because it was toward the end and they had probably spent a lot of time at the beginning cleaning it out of the field. And right before we left we watched them put in a couple internnal stitches. Then we left there. Originally we were supposed to see a removal of a pretty severe melanoma (at least that was what I heard) but Jen needed to watch lectures and really so did I, and since they still had to clean up the operating room before they could get started I knew it would be a while and I had lectures to watch too so I decided not to stay. I probably should have just to see the whole thing, but I was also really tired. So I left when Jen did. All in all it was really cool to see and I'm glad to got to go. The 3rd year kept asking us questions, which we really didn't know, but he was patient and he helped up to reason out the answer until we could get it or it was absolutely obvious that we were hopeless. I learned that if you are going to give PCA (patient controlled analgesia) you also must give diphenhydramine (benadryl-for itching), a motillity agent (for constipation, which I knew), and a mu antagonist (which I had no idea and took a lot of guidance and him practically telling me the answer before I was able to shout it out). The only thing I noticed was that no one but the anesthesiologist speaks loudy enough to really hear. You have to strain to hear everything else that it going on.

posted by Malissa at 1:51 PM